The Cost of Retrying: Exploiting Retry-Mechanisms in Cloud Applications by DDoS Attacks

Retry mechanisms are commonly used in microservices architectures as a mechanism for recovering from transit errors, including network failures and service overloading. This research aims at studying the operation of cloud retry mechanisms under deliberated DDoS attacks, and their effect on the application performance and operational costs. In this poster we focus on the economic aspect, and demonstrate that enabling such mechanisms improperly might be counter-productive and expose the system to substantial
and quadratic economical damage in the presence of attacks.