Infrastructure as Mitigation: A Feasibility Study of Using Auto-Scaling Against DoS Attacks in a Microservices Environment

• Emanuel Ávila Cruz UFC
• João Batista Andrade UFC
• João Henrique Corrêa UFC

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wtf.2024.3311

Abstract

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, becoming a major challenge today, impacting companies negatively, and causing financial loss and damage to reputation. Furthermore, these attacks are generated to look like legitimate clients, making it difficult for detection/mitigation tools to do their job. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of the auto-scaling feature, available in the Kubernetes platform, to offer a higher availability during a DoS attack. It was verified during experiments that clients experienced an increase in availability and a decrease in service time when the auto-scaling strategy was enabled, during attacks.

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