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Denial-of-Service attacks on PCI passthrough devices: Demonstrating the impact on network- and storage-I/O performance.
- Source :
-
Journal of Systems Architecture . Nov2015, Vol. 61 Issue 10, p592-599. 8p. - Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- PCI Passthrough is an established x86 server technology for directly assigning PCIe devices to Virtual Machines (VMs). In combination with Single Root I/O Virtualization, which enables concurrent sharing of single physical PCIe I/O devices, PCI Passthrough enables low overhead and high performance I/O virtualization. Besides server environments, the combination is also a promising approach for sharing I/O in future multi-core embedded systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that PCI Passthrough has yet-to-be-solved problems regarding performance isolation, because it is prone to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. VMs executing DoS attacks on Passthrough devices can degrade the I/O performance of devices that share PCIe links with the DoS victim, which may affect concurrent VMs and the host. We evaluate how attacks on an SR-IOV capable Gigabit Ethernet NIC cause a degradation of the system’s network- and storage-I/O performance. The attacked NIC’s TCP throughput drops by 35%; other NICs that share PCIe links with the victim see degradations of 46% and 65%; performance of a host-assigned SSD degrades by 77%. We investigate what influences the severity of such attacks and introduce three protection approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 13837621
- Volume :
- 61
- Issue :
- 10
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Journal of Systems Architecture
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 111294872
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sysarc.2015.07.003