Impact Analysis of HTTP and SYN Flood DDoS Attacks on Apache 2 and IIS 10.0 Web Servers

Nowadays, continuously accessing Internet services is vital for the most of people. However, due to Denial of Service (DoS) and its severe type ‘Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), online services becomes unavailable to users in sometimes. Rather than DDoS is dangerous and has serious impact on the Internet consumers, there are multiple types of that attack such Slowrise, ping of death and UDP, ICMP, SYN flood, etc. In this paper, the effect of HTTP and SYN flood attack on the most recent and widely used web servers is studied and evaluated. Systematic performance analysis is performed on Internet Information Service 10.0 (IIS 10.0) on Windows server 2016 and Apache 2 on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support (LTS) server. Furthermore, the key metrics of the performance are average response time, average CPU usage and standard deviation as a responsiveness, efficiency and stability of the web servers. The results show that the IIS10.0 outperformed Apache2 web server in efficiency and responsiveness during HTTP flood attack. However, Apache2 web server achievement was more responsive and performed more stability with SYN flood attack.