Icebergs in the Clouds:
the Other Risks of Cloud Computing
Bryan Ford
Yale University
4th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing
(HotCloud '12)
June 12, 2012, Boston, MA
Abstract
Cloud computing is appealing from management and efficiency perspectives,
but brings risks both known and unknown.
Well-known and hotly-debated information security risks,
due to software vulnerabilities, insider attacks, and side-channels for example,
may be only the “tip of the iceberg.”
As diverse, independently developed cloud services
share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools,
unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms
could lead to dynamic instabilities or “meltdowns.”
Non-transparent layering structures,
where alternative cloud services may appear independent
but share deep, hidden resource dependencies,
may create unexpected and potentially catastrophic failure correlations,
reminiscent of financial industry crashes.
Finally,
cloud computing exacerbates already-difficult
digital preservation challenges,
because only the provider of a cloud-based application or service
can archive a “live,” functional copy
of a cloud artifact and its data
for long-term cultural preservation.
This paper explores these largely unrecognized risks,
making the case that we should study them
before
our socioeconomic fabric becomes inextricably dependent on
a convenient but potentially unstable computing model.
Paper:
PDF
In the News
- Detailed Questions Hit the Cloud,
Greg Goth,
IEEE Internet Computing,
Sep-Oct, 2012.
- That Glorious Fireworks Fail Last Week? Imagine That's Your Data,
Edward Tenner,
The Atlantic,
July 13, 2012.
- Amazon Web Services: The hidden bugs that made AWS' outage worse,
Jack Clark,
Cloud Watch,
July 3, 2012.
- Cloud Computing: Interdependent Services Could Lead to Domino-Effect Failures,
Dick Weisinger,
Formtek Blog,
July 3, 2012.
- Cloud secrecy: Will it cause a system meltdown?,
Jack Clark,
Cloud Watch,
June 13, 2012.
- The Cloud, or a Monster on the Loose?,
Arthur Cole,
ITBusinessEdge,
June 11, 2012.
- Yale researcher warns of cloud ‘meltdowns’,
Dan O'Shea,
Fierce Enterprise Communications,
June 11, 2012.
- Yale researcher warns of cloud complexity,
Nick Farrell,
TechEYE.net,
June 11, 2012.
- Researcher: Interdependencies could lead to cloud
‘meltdowns’,
Chris Kanaracus,
PC Advisor,
June 7, 2012.
- Cloudburst: Unexplored Risks of the Cloud,
Keith Dawson,
Business Agility,
April 4, 2012.
- The Risk of a Meltdown In the Cloud,
Slashdot,
March 20, 2012.
- The Hidden Risk of a Meltdown in the Cloud,
Physics arXiv Blog,
March 13, 2012.
International
- File mobiele webdiensten zet bedrijfsleven op zwart,
De Telegraaf: Mijnbedrijf (Netherlands),
June 12, 2012.
- Cloudcrash dreigt door onderlinge afhankelijkheid,
Henk-Jan Buist,
webwereld (Netherlands),
June 11, 2012.
- 调查显示过度依赖云可能导致经济崩溃,
China Mobile,
June 11, 2012.
- Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud ‘Meltdowns’,
Chris Kanaracus,
CIO.IN (India),
June 8, 2012.
Funding
This research was supported by
the National Science Foundation under grant
CNS-1149936.