22.06.2023 | 10:00 - 11:00 Uhr: Anat Bremler-Barr, Blavatnik School of Computer Science, Tel-Aviv University

Biografie

Prof. Anat Bremler-Barr is a computer network researcher. In 2001, she co-founded Riverhead Networks Inc., a company that provides systems to protect from Denial-of-Service attacks. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2004. She then became a faculty member of Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at Reichman University. In 2023, she joined the Blavatnik School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.  She is the founder and director of the Deepness Lab, which focuses on designing reliable and efficient networks and network devices. Her research interests are in computer networks and network security. Her recent research works are focused on DNS security, Cloud security, IoT security, DDoS mitigation, and CVEs analysis.

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