Abstract
Cloud computing is currently one of the most hyped information technology fields and it has become one of the fastest growing segments of IT. Cloud computing allows us to scale our servers in magnitude and availability in order to provide services to a greater number of end users. Moreover, adopters of the cloud service model are charged based on a pay-per-use basis of the cloud's server and network resources, aka utility computing. With this model, a conventional DDoS attack on server and network resources is transformed in a cloud environment to a new breed of attack that targets the cloud adopter's economic resource, namely Economic Denial of Sustainability attack (EDoS). In this paper, we advocate a novel solution, named EDoS-Shield, to mitigate the Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) attack in the cloud computing systems. We design a discrete simulation experiment to evaluate its performance and the results show that it is a promising solution to mitigate the EDoS.