Simulation Analysis of SYN Flood and HTTP Flood Attacks on Cloud Infrastructure Integrity

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative simulation study of SYN Flood and HTTP Flood Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in cloud environments using CloudSim. A modular testbed was configured with attacker VMs generating cloudlets and victim VMs handling legitimate workloads, under realistic network constraints. Experimental results revealed distinct attack signatures: SYN Flood produced high volumes of half-open connections, while HTTP Flood exhausted CPU, memory, and bandwidth due to resource-intensive request processing. SYN Flood achieved a 35% packet loss rate with 10,000 cloudlets, while HTTP Flood produced a 40% loss rate with only 3,000 requests, demonstrating that application-layer attacks, though lower in volume, cause more severe degradation. These findings highlight the importance of nuanced defense strategies tailored to each attack type, beyond volumetric thresholds alone.