How to shutdown a cloud: a DDoS attack in a private infrastructure-as-a-service cloud

Cloud computing has become a hot spot in both industry and academia due to its rapid elasticity and on demand service. However, with outsourcing the data and business applications to a third party, security and privacy issues have become a critical concern. To decrease cloud availability, which is one of the most representative security attributes, DDoS attacks can be launched. In this paper, we try to show how a hacker can launch a DDoS attack based on virtual machine (VM) co-residence to deny the service of cloud data centre in a private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud. We first introduce how to launch this attack. Then we build a Markov-chain model to simulate this attack and analyse performance of cloud data centre. Finally, we also conduct several experiments to show how VM co-residence has impact on performance of physical machines (PMs).