Mitigating DoS to authenticated cloud REST APIs

Systems available on the Internet are day-by-day targets of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. These attacks can leave a system with high response time or even make it unresponsive. A DoS attack can be executed at the network level, just by exploiting communication protocols weakness, or at application level, by exploiting implementation issues. Based on this scenario, this article presents a mechanism for mitigating DoS attacks aimed at exploiting REST applications using authentication tokens. This mitigation is based on the client behaviour, where it can be classified as possible malicious client. Our results show a response time decrease of 36% during an attack scenario applied to a cloud management system.