ISI Report

Evolution in cloud services and infrastructure has been constantly reshaping the way we conduct business and provide services in our day to day lives. Tools and technologies created to improve such cloud services can also be used to impair them. By using generic tools like nmap, hping and wget, one can estimate the placement of virtual machines in a cloud infrastructure with a high likelihood. Moreover, such knowledge and tools can also be used by adversaries to further launch various kinds of attacks. In this paper we focus on one such specific kind of attack, namely a denial of service (DoS), where an attacker congests a bottleneck network channel shared among virtual machines (VMs) co- resident on the same physical node in the cloud infrastructure. We evaluate the behavior of this shared network channel using Click modular router on DETER testbed. We illustrate that game theoretic concepts can be used to model this attack as a two-player game and recommend strategies for defending against such attacks.