The Impact of Cloud Architecture and Design on the Effectiveness of Rate-Based Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

A highly available service is now a cornerstone requirement of any cloud service. Amongst the threats faced by any cloud service, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks are a significant concern when designing services with high availability. Good design decisions help detect and mitigate attacks quickly, whereas poor decisions can introduce tech debt and complicate the detection and mitigation of attacks. In this paper, we will focus primarily on rate-based DDoS attacks, a kind of attack in which the malicious actor tries to exhaust the service's resources by sending fraudulent requests from zombie computers worldwide, making it hard to detect and pinpoint the source of the attack. We will explore different architecture and design decisions that can be used to mitigate DDoS attacks with minimum degradation of latency.