Högskolan i Skövde

Distributed Denial of Service attacks are an ever prevalent challenge for system administra-tors today to overcome. The attack, which is all about restricting legitimate users access to a service, such as a web-page. Can cost companies and governments millions of dollars if not properly managed.

This study aims to explore if there is any difference in performance between some of the most modern iterations of popular server operating systems today. Those server operating systems are: Windows Server 2016, Ubuntu 16 and FreeBSD 11. And submitting them to one of the most popular DDoS attacks at the time of writing, a so called HTTP-Get request. The webservers used are some of the most widely used today, Apache and Microsoft IIS.

Each server will be submitted to attacks, and compared between one another. Different de-fence methods will also be tested and examined. Tests include shorter tests that is repeated multiple times for data validity, and one longer test for every condition in order to control if the results are similar. During these tests, the operating systems will measure CPU/RAM utilization, and a control computer will measure Round Trip Time.

Windows Server 2016 using IIS and FreeBSD 11 perform similarly resource wise, but Win-dows Server 2016 with IIS had a better Round Trip Time performance. Windows Server 2016 with Apache performs worst in all measurements, while Ubuntu 16 performs in the middle, but has the most stable performance.