A First Look at Thermal Attacks in Multi-Tenant Data Centers

Abstract

This paper focuses on the emerging threat of thermal attacks in a multi-tenant data center. It discovers that a malicious tenant (i.e., attacker) can inject additional thermal loads beyond the shared cooling system capacity, thus resulting in overheating and possible system downtime. Importantly, the attacker can launch thermal attacks in a stealthy manner by discharging batteries inside its servers and still keeping its power drawn from the data center power distribution system under its subscribed capacity.