Scheduler vulnerabilities and coordinated attacks in cloud computing

In hardware virtualization a hypervisor provides multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single physical system, each executing a separate operating system instance. The hypervisor schedules execution of these VMs much as the scheduler in an operating system does, balancing factors such as fairness and I/O performance. As in an operating system, the scheduler may be vulnerable to malicious behavior on the part of users seeking to deny service to others or maximize their own resource usage. Recently, publically available cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2 have used virtualization to provide customers with virtual machines running on the provider's hardware, typically charging by wall clock time rather than resources consumed. Under this business model, manipulation of the scheduler may allow theft of service at the expense of other customers, rather than merely re-allocating resources within the same administrative domain. We describe a flaw in the Xen scheduler allowing virtual machines to consume almost all CPU time, in preference to other users, and demonstrate kernel-based and user-space versions of the attack. We show results demonstrating the vulnerability in the lab, consuming as much as 98% of CPU time regardless of fair share, as well as on Amazon EC2, where Xen modifications protect other users but still allow theft of service (following the responsible disclosure model, we have reported this vulnerability to Amazon; they have since implemented a fix that we have tested and verified). We provide a novel analysis of the necessary conditions for such attacks, and describe scheduler modifications to eliminate the vulnerability. We present experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of these defenses while imposing negligible overhead. Also, cloud providers such as Amazon's EC2 do not explicitly reveal the mapping of virtual machines to physical hosts [in: ACM CCS, 2009]. Our attack itself provides a mechanism for detecting the co-placement of VMs, which in conjunction with appropriate algorithms can be utilized to reveal this mapping. Other cloud computing attacks may use this mapping algorithm to detect the placement of victims.