From high-availability to collapse: quantitative analysis of “Cloud-Droplet-Freezing” attack threats to virtual machine migration in cloud computing

Virtual machines (VM) migration can improve availability, manageability, performance and fault tolerance of systems. Current migration researches mainly focus on the promotion of the efficiency by using shared storage, priority-based policy etc.. But the effect of migration is not well concerned. In fact, once physical servers are overloaded from denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack, a hasty migration operation not only unable to alleviate the harm of the attack, but also increases the harmfulness. In this paper, a novel DDoS attack, Cloud-Droplet-Freezing (CDF) attack, is described according to the characteristics of cloud computing cluster. Our experiments show that such attack is able to congest internal network communication of cloud server cluster, whilst consume resources of physical server. Base on the analysis of CDF attack, we highlight the method of evaluating potential threats hidden behind the normal VM migration and analyze the flaws of existing intrusion detection systems/prevention system for defensing the CDF attack.