Exploring potential vulnerabilities in data center network

Abstract

In this paper, we study the potential security issues in data center networks (DCN). We focus on TCP, and propose a synchronized denial of service (SDoS) attack model. In SDoS, malicious tenants may employ multiple virtual machines (VM) as attackers and launch a low-rate synchronized DoS attack to VMs of the targeted victims. We give an analysis and our preliminary experiments confirm the feasibility of such SDoS attack.