Proactive DDoS Attack Mitigation in Cloud-Fog Environment using Moving Target Defense

Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are serious cyber attacks and mitigating DDoS attacks in cloud is a topic of ongoing research interest which remains a major security challenge. Fog computing is an extension of cloud computing which has been used to secure cloud. Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a newly recognized, proactive security defense that can be used to mitigate DDoS attacks on cloud. MTD intends to make a system dynamic in nature and uncertain by changing attack surface continuously to confuse attackers. In this paper, a novel DDoS mitigation framework is presented to support Cloud-Fog Platform using MTD technique (CFPM). CFPM applies migration MTD technique at fog layer to mitigate DDoS attacks in cloud. It detects attacker among all the legitimate clients proactively at the fog layer and isolate it from innocent clients. CFPM uses an effective request handling procedure for load balancing and attacker isolation procedure which aims to minimize disruption to cloud server as well as serving fog servers. In addition, effectiveness of CFPM is evaluated by analyzing the behavior of the system before and after attack, considering different possible scenarios. This approach is effective as it uses the advantage of both MTD technique and Fog computing paradigm supporting cloud environment.