Economic Denial of Sustainability in Kubernetes based clouds

Presenter

Jonathan Chamberalain

Abstract

Within Kubernetes, autoscaling on the pod and cluster levels enable flexibility in resource allocation, ensuring applications remain accessible even during periods of heavy traffic. While this is a useful mitigation against Denial of Service attacks, an adversary may pivot to instead simply wasting resources and create an Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) scenario, forcing application owners to pay for unneeded Kubernetes nodes. This talk looks at work done to study a particular class of EDoS attack, the “Yo-Yo”, and our current efforts in attempting to identify more sophisticated attacks.