Analysis of DDoS Attacks and an Introduction of a Hybrid Statistical Model to Detect DDoS Attacks on Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud service availability has been one of the major concerns of cloud service providers (CSP), while hosting different cloud based information technology services by managing different resources on the internet. The vulnerability of internet, the distribute nature of cloud computing, various security issues related to cloud computing service models, and cloud's main attributes contribute to its susceptibility of security threats associated with cloud service availability. One of the major sophisticated threats that happen to be very difficult and challenging to counter due to its distributed nature and resulted in cloud service disruption is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Even though there are number of intrusion detection solutions proposed by different research groups, and cloud service providers (CSP) are currently using different detection solutions by promising that their product is well secured, there is no such a perfect solution that prevents the DDoS attack. The characteristics of DDoS attack, i.e., having different appearance with different scenarios, make it difficult to detect. This paper will review and analyze different existing DDoS detecting techniques against different parameters, discusses their advantage and disadvantages, and propose a hybrid statistical model that could significantly mitigate these attacks and be a better alternative solution for current detection problems.