Identifying and Isolating Zombie Attack in Cloud Computing
Peter Awon-natemi Agbedemnab *
Department of Information Systems and Technology, C. K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Ghana.
Salifu Abdul-Mumin
Department of Information Systems and Technology, C. K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Ghana.
Zakaria Abdulrahim
Department of Information Systems and Technology, C. K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Ghana.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The cloud computing architecture is a berth in which third party, virtual machine and cloud service providers are involved in data uploading and downloading. A major challenge in this architecture, however, is the security of the data as there exist various forms of attacks from malicious people
and devices. Among these security attacks, the zombie attack is the most advance type of attack. The zombie attack reduces network performance in terms of delay and bandwidth consumption. With zombie attack, some malicious users may join the network which, in turn takes off the data of legitimate users and at the same time enable zombie nodes to communicate with a virtual machine on behalf of the legitimate user. In this paper, a technique based on strong authentication which, is able to detect malicious users from a network and isolates them from the cloud architecture is proposed.
Keywords: Authentication, cloud computing, security, malicious user, virtual machine, zombie attack.