A Cooperative Intrusion Detection System Framework for Cloud Computing Networks

Cloud computing provides a framework for supporting end users easily attaching powerful services and applications through Internet. To provide secure and reliable services in cloud computing environment is an important issue. One of the security issues is how to reduce the impact of denial-of-service (DoS) attack or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) in this environment. To counter these kinds of attacks, a framework of cooperative intrusion detection system (IDS) is proposed. The proposed system could reduce the impact of these kinds of attacks. To provide such ability, IDSs in the cloud computing regions exchange their alerts with each other. In the system, each of IDSs has a cooperative agent used to compute and determine whether to accept the alerts sent from other IDSs or not. By this way, IDSs could avoid the same type of attack happening. The implementation results indicate that the proposed system could resist DoS attack. Moreover, by comparison, the proposed cooperative IDS system only increases little computation effort compared with pure Snort based IDS but prevents the system from single point of failure attack.