Why Are Repeated Auctions in RaaS Clouds Risky?

The world of cloud computing is progressing from the concept of securing resources by predefined units to dynamically allocating resources using economic mechanisms. New mechanisms offer better utilization of the hardware by sharing it among multiple users. However, they allow new types of economic attacks. We introduce two new economic attacks performed by malicious users. These attacks harm the aggregate utility of Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) clouds. Our first attack aims at raising bills in the system, and causing victims to pay more for the same amount of resources. Over time the attack may cause victims to exhaust their budget, thus lowering their demand for resource allocation, and allowing the attacker to acquire the freed resources at a negligible cost. Our second attack is designed to hinder the victim’s performance at specific points in time by outbidding them for a single round. For resources of high regaining costs or that their full utilization takes time (e.g., RAM), even a single round without the resource may significantly hinder the performance. In this work we demonstrate on a simple representative example how the first attack reduces the victim’s profit sevenfold and the second attack causes damage of $290–$630 for every dollar spent on the attack.