Power Attack: An Increasing Threat to Data Centers

Entering the era of cloud computing, data centers are scaling in a fast pace. However, as the increasing number of servers being deployed in data centers, the data center power distribution systems have already approached peak capacities. Since the upgrades of the power systems are extremely expensive, power oversubscription has become a trend in modern data centers as a cost-effective way to handle power provisioning. Under benign workload of data centers, power oversubscription works well as servers rarely peak simultaneously. However, power oversubscription makes data centers vulnerable to malicious workload that can generate power spikes on multiple servers at the same time, which may cause branch circuit breakers to trip and lead to undesired power outages. In this paper, we introduce a new security concept called power attack and exploit the attack vectors in platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) cloud environments, respectively. To demonstrate the feasibility of launching a power attack, we conduct series of hardware experiments and datacenter-level simulations. Moreover, we give a detailed analysis on how different power management methods can affect a power attack and how to mitigate such an attack. Our experimental results and analysis show that power attacks will pose a serious threat to modern data centers and should be taken into account while deploying new high-density servers and power management techniques.