Evaluation of CentOS performance under IoT based DDoS Security Attacks

The increasing interest in `always-connected' devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have led to many electronic devices with Internet connectivity becoming omnipresent in modern households and workplaces. Consequently, this increase has also led to an increase in vulnerable IoT devices, ripe for being hijacked by a malicious third party. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have consistently been an issue since the birth of the Internet. With the large number of IoT devices available today, the strength and intensity of these attacks continue to grow. Not all devices are created equal in terms of vulnerabilities that may exist with them. Many harbor flaws that allow them to be used as a bot by an external malicious host without the knowledge of the owner. Myriad of such devices can be used in a network of zombie machines (botnet) meant to carry out an attack. These botnets are used to flood a victim system with information aimed at consuming large amounts of resources, such as memory or processing power. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of CentOS 15 operating system under four popular DDoS attack scenarios in a controlled experimental environment.