Secured Cloud Computing

While cloud computing offers many advantages, it remains susceptible to security breaches. Major threats to cloud security are Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) and Man-in-Middle (MIM) attacks.

DDoS Attacks attempt to make a resource unavailable to its end users by targeting services hosted on high profile webservers, i.e. credit card payment gateways, bank sites, etc. In a DDoS attack, the incoming traffic will flood the victim from many different sources, potentially hundreds, thousands, or more. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the DDoS attack simply by restricting a single IP address; and, it is very difficult to distinguish normal user traffic from attack traffic when spread across so many points of origin.

MIM Attacks intrude into an existing communication and inject false information by eavesdropping, intercepting and selectively modifying the data.These attackes are referred to as “session hijacking attacks” since the intruder gains access to a legitimate user’s session in order to tamper it. The attack initially starts with sniffing and eavesdropping on a network connection and trying to alter or reroute the intercepted data.

It is essential to research and develop counter measures for DDoS and MIM attacks. In this Knowledge Sharing article, Gnanendra Reddy discusses these and other security issues and offers solutions to improve resource availability and enhance the security of information in the cloud.

Read the full article.