An Enhanced Cloud-Based Secure Authentication (ECSA) Protocol Suite for Prevention of Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks

Abstract

Cloud systems are currently one of the primary solutions used in the information technology (IT) domain, also known as cloud services. Cloud services are accessed via an identity authentication process. These authentication processes have become gradually vulnerable to aggressive attackers who may perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to keep cloud services inaccessible. Several strong authentication protocols have been employed to protect traditional network systems and verify the identity of the users. Nevertheless, these authentication protocols could cause a DoS threat when implemented in the cloud-computing system. This is because the comprehensive verification process may exhaust the clouds� resources and shut their services down. In this work, we propose an enhanced cloud-based secure authentication protocol suite to operate as DoS resistance on multiple cloud layers. Our proposed solution utilizes multi-technique to prevent external and internal risks of DoS attacks. These techniques can distinguish legitimate a user�s requests from an attacker�s requests and then direct the legitimate user to the requested service(s). The cloud�s servers in the proposed authentication process become imprint-free servers, and fully aware of DoS attacks. To validate the proposed solution, an experiment is conducted using state-of-the-art cloud simulation (GreenCloud). The experimental results verify that the proposed solution is practically applicable as a lightweight authentication protocol suite in multiple cloud layers in terms of reliability and scalability.