Practical Private Cloud Testbed for Studying The Effects of A Botnet Attack

Abstract

Many universities and organizations are considering the idea of migrating their data centers to cloud computing. Among the many cloud computing deployment models; the private cloud is the preferred one for such organizations since; it maintains their controllability and enhance security of their servers. Albeit, there are still some risks of attacks. One of these is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) where a large amount of compromised hosts called botnet attacks a specific server causing its service degradation. A test bed for a private cloud computing network was built in the lab making use of Oracle VM Virtual Box as a virtualization environment. This test bed was subjected to a DDoS attack of the SYN-Flood type in multiple scenarios of bots percentage deployment. The same attack was carried out on an Opnet simulation model of the test bed. The results of the practical testbed and the simulation model confirm the devastating effects of such attacks as the botnet size increases.