Cloud-Based Secure Authentication (CSA) Protocol Suite for Defense against DoS Attacks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel cloud-based authentication protocol suite that detects and defends against DoS attacks, optimizing resource use and maintaining service availability in cloud environments.

Contribution

The work presents a multilevel adaptive authentication protocol that enhances security against DoS attacks while reducing resource consumption in cloud services.

Findings

Effective identification of legitimate user requests

Enhanced defense against external DoS attackers

Footprint-free cloud authentication process

Abstract

Cloud-based services have become part of our day-to-day software solutions. The identity authentication process is considered to be the main gateway to these services. As such, these gates have become increasingly susceptible to aggressive attackers, who may use Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to close these gates permanently. There are a number of authentication protocols that are strong enough to verify identities and protect traditional networked applications. However, these authentication protocols may themselves introduce DoS risks when used in cloud-based applications. This risk introduction is due to the utilization of a heavy verification process that may consume the cloud resources and disable the application service. In this work, we propose a novel cloud-based authentication protocol suite that not only is aware of the internal DoS threats but is also capable of defending against external DoS attackers. The proposed solution uses a multilevel adaptive technique to dictate the efforts of the protocol participants. This technique is capable of identifying a legitimate users requests and placing them at the front of the authentication process queue. The authentication process was designed in such a way that the cloud-based servers become footprint-free and completely aware of the risks of any DoS attack.