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

Practical Private Cloud Testbed for StudyingThe Effects of A Botnet AttackNoor Raad Saadallah Al-Hankawi Dr. Mohammed Basheer Al-SomaidaiCollege of EngineeringUniversity of Mosul[emailprotected] [emailprotected]AbstractMany universities and organizations are considering the idea of migrating theirdata centers to cloud computing. Among the many cloud computing deployment models;the private cloud is the preferred one for such organizations since; it maintains theircontrollability and enhance security of their servers. Albeit, there are still some risks ofattacks. One of these is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) where a large amountof compromised hosts called botnet attacks a specific server causing its servicedegradation. A test bed for a private cloud computing network was built in the labmaking use of Oracle VM Virtual Box as a virtualization environment. This test bed wassubjected to a DDoS attack of the SYN-Flood type in multiple scenarios of botspercentage deployment. The same attack was carried out on an Opnet simulation modelof the test bed. The results of the practical testbed and the simulation model confirm thedevastating effects of such attacks as the botnet size increases.Keywords: Botnet; DDoS attack; Hypervisor; Private Cloud Computing; SLA;Virtualization. . . . SYN-Flood Oracle Virtual Box . Opnet .