I wrote about the notion of EDoS (Economic Denial Of Sustainability) back in November. You can find the original blog post here.
The basic premise of the concept was the following:
I had a thought about how the utility and agility of the cloud computing models such as Amazon AWS (EC2/S3) and the pricing models that go along with them can actually pose a very nasty risk to those who use the cloud to provide service.
That thought got me noodling about how the pay-as-you-go model could be used for nefarious means.
Specifically, this
usage-based model potentially enables $evil_person who knows that a
service is cloud-based to manipulate service usage billing in orders of
magnitude that could be disguised easily as legitimate use of the
service but drive costs to unmanageable levels.
If you take Amazon's AWS usage-based pricing model (check out the cost calculator here,) one might envision that instead of worrying about a lack of resources, the
elasticity of the cloud could actually provide a surplus of compute,
network and storage utility that could be just as bad as a deficit.
Instead of worrying about Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks from botnets and the like, imagine having to worry about delicately balancing forecasted need with capabilities like Cloudbursting to deal with a botnet designed to make seemingly legitimate requests for service to generate an economic denial of sustainability (EDoS) -- where the dyamicism of the infrastructure allows scaling of service beyond the economic means of the vendor to pay their cloud-based service bills.
At any rate, here are a couple of interesting related items:
- Wei Yan, a threat researcher for Trend Micro, recently submitted an IEEE journal submission titled "Anti-Virus In-the-Cloud Service: Are We Ready for the Security Evolution?" in which he discusses and interesting concept for cloud-based AV and also cites/references my EDoS concept. Thanks, Wei!
- There is a tangential story making the rounds recently about how researcher Brett O'Connor has managed to harness Amazon's EC2 to harvest/host/seed BitTorrent files.
The relevant quote from the story that relates to EDoS is really about the visibility (or lack thereof) as to how cloud networks in their abstraction are being used and how the costs associated with that use might impact the cloud providers themselves. Remember, the providers have to pay for the infrastructure even if the "consumers" do not:
"This means, says Hobson, that hackers and other interested parties can simply use a prepaid (and anonymous) debit card to pay the $75 a month fee to Amazon and harvest BitTorrent applications at high speed with little or no chance of detection...
It's not clear that O'Connor's clever work-out represents anything new in principle, but it does raise the issue of how cloud computing providers plan to monitor and manage what their services are being used for."
It's likely we'll see additional topics that relate to EDoS soon.
UPDATE: Let me try and give a clear example that differentiates EDoS from DDoS in a cloud context, although ultimately the two concepts are related:
DDoS (and DoS for that matter) attacks are blunt force trauma. The goal, regardless of motive, is to overwhelm infrastructure and remove from service a networked target by employing a distributed number of $evil_doers. Example: a botnet is activated to swarm/overwhelm an Internet connected website using an asynchronous attack which makes the site unavailable due to an exhaustion of resources (compute, network or storage.)
EDoS attacks are death by 1000 cuts. EDoS can also utilize distributed $evil_doers as well as single entities, but works by making legitimate web requests at volumes that may appear to be "normal" but are done so to drive compute, network and storage utility billings in a cloud model abnormally high. Example: a botnet is ativated to visit a website whose income results from ecommerce purchases. The requests are all legitimate but the purchases never made. The vendor has to pay the cloud provider for increased elastic use of resources where revenue was never recognized to offset them.
We have anti-DDoS capabilities today with tools that are quite mature. DDoS is generally easy to spot given huge increases in traffic. EDoS attacks are not necessarily easy to detect, because the instrumentation and busines logic is not present in most applications or stacks of applications and infrastructure to provide the correlation between "requests" and " successful transactions." In the example above, increased requests may look like normal activity.
Given the attractiveness of startups and SME/SMB's to the cloud for cost and agility, this presents a problem The SME/SMB customers do not generally invest in this sort of integration, the cloud computing platform providers generally do not have the intelligence and visibility into these applications which they do not own, and typical DDoS tools don't, either.
So DDoS and EDoS ultimately can end with the same outcome: the target whithers and ceases to be able to offer service, but I think that EDoS is something significant that should be discussed and investigated.
/Hoff
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