Cloud Auto-scaling Mechanism Under DDoS Attacks: Yo-Yo Attack and Tandem Attack

Anat Bremler-Barr, Michael Czeizler
Red Hat research ,
2023
Talk
Cloud, DDoS attack

Abstract

It is a common belief that Auto-scaling mechanisms serve as a mitigation for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on cloud computing infrastructures by dynamically adding machines to cope with the additional load. Intuitively, such attacks are mostly associated with Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) derived from paying for the extra resources required to process the malicious incoming traffic.

Contrary to this belief, we present and analyze the Yo-Yo attack, a new attack against the auto-scaling mechanism that can cause significant performance degradation in addition to economic damage. We demonstrate the attack on Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, and serverless architecture. We then present and analyze Tandem Attack, a new attack on Microservices architecture. In this attack, the attacker exploits the tandem behavior of services with different auto-scaling mechanisms, causing both economic and performance damage.

Video

Supplemental Material

April 4, 2023
Red Hat page

@misc{Bremler-Barr2023,
author = {Anat Bremler-Barr and Michael Czeizler},
title = {Tandem Attack: DDoS Attack on Micro-service Auto-scaling Mechanisms},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) – Poster and Brief Announcement},
year = {2023},
}