Can a DDoS Attack Meltdown My Data Center? A Simulation Study and Defense Strategies

The goal of this letter is to explore the extent to which the vulnerabilities plaguing the Internet, particularly susceptibility to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, impact the Cloud. DDoS has been known to disrupt Cloud services, but could it do worse by permanently damaging server and switch hardware? Services are hosted in data centers with thousands of servers generating large amounts of heat. Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems prevent server downtime due to overheating. These are remotely managed using network management protocols that are susceptible to network attacks. Recently, Cloud providers have experienced outages due to HVAC malfunctions. Our contributions include a network simulation to study the feasibility of such an attack motivated by our experiences of such a security incident in a real data center. It demonstrates how a network simulator can study the interplay of the communication and thermal properties of a network and help prevent the Cloud provider's worst nightmare: meltdown of the data center as a result of a DDoS attack.