SDN-based DoS Attack Detection and Mitigation System for Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing is a technology that brings advantages such as a dynamic architecture, on-demand offered services
and resources, ubiquitous access and reduced costs. All of these characteristics make it popular between companies and
organizations, who are adopting and implementing it in their systems. However, all this attention also attract attackers,
worrying the users of the cloud. For this, Software Defined Networking appears as an innovative method which enables a
more flexible and easy management of the network, permitting also the quick implementation of security policies and
solutions. Following that, a SDN-based DoS attack detection and mitigation system for cloud environments was
proposed. This solution uses the monitoring API called sFlow and the OpenFlow protocol, which permits to have a
mapping of IP addresses, MAC addresses and ports and gather traffic statistics from the networking devices and servers.
The purpose of this system also includes the detection of any additional IP or MAC spoofing attack, common
characteristic of recent DoS attacks to avoid identifying the origin of the attack, so the design will help identify any
internal host abused by an attacker or if the attack is coming from an external host. Additionally, the solution will
include a DoS Security application, which will define security policies about the detection and mitigation of DoS attacks
and will orchestrate the modules that performs those activities.