Thermal Attacks on Storage Systems
Nathanael Paul, Sudhanva Gurumurthi, David Evans
23rd
IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies
College Park, Maryland, May 2006
Abstract
Disk drives are a performance bottleneck for data-intensive
applications. Drive manufacturers have continued to increase the
rotational speeds to meet performance requirements, but the faster
drives consume more power and run hotter. Future drives will soon be
operating at temperatures that threaten drive reliability. One strategy
that has been proposed for increasing drive performance without
sacrificing reliability is throttling. Throttling delays service to I/O
requests after the disk temperature exceeds a set threshold temperature
until the temperatures drops. In this paper, we explore the possibility
that a malicious attacker with the ability to issue disk read requests
may be able to exploit throttling to carry out a denial-ofservice attack
on a storage system. Our results reveal that damaging attacks are
possible when throttling is used, and argue for the use of variable
speed disks as a less vulnerable thermal management alternative.
Complete Paper (9 pages)
[PDF]
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