Today’s software development landscape has witnessed a shift towards microservices architectures. Using this approach, large software systems are composed of multiple separate microservices, each responsible for specific tasks. The breakdown to microservices is also reflected in the infrastructure, where individual microservices can be executed with different hardware configurations and scaling properties. As systems grow larger, incoming traffic can trigger multiple calls between different microservices to handle each request.
Auto-scaling is a technique widely used to adapt systems to fluctuating traffic loads by automatically increasing (scale-up) and decreasing (scale-down) the number of resources used.
Our work shows that when microservices with separate auto-scaling mechanisms work in tandem to process ingress traffic, they can overload each other. This overload results in throttling (DoS)
or the over-provisioning of resources (EDoS).
In the lecture we will demonstrate how an attacker can exploit the tandem behavior of microservices with different auto-scaling mechanisms to create an attack we denote as the Tandem Attack. We demonstrate the attack on a typical and recommended serverless architecture, using AWS Lambda for code execution and DynamoDB as database. Part of the results will be presented as an IEEE INFOCOM’23 poster.
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