Why "Some" Like It Hot Too: Thermal Attack on Data Centers

A trend in modern data centers is to raise the temperature and maintain all servers in a relatively hot environment. While this can save on cooling costs given benign workloads running in servers, the hot environment increases the risk of cooling failure. In this work, we introduce the security concept of thermal attack on a data center that exploits thermal-intensive workloads to severely worsen the thermal conditions in the data center. To unveil the vulnerability of a data center to thermal attacks, we conduct thermal measurements and propose effective thermal attack vectors. To evaluate the impacts of thermal attacks inside a data center, we simulate datacenter-level thermal attacks using a real-world data center trace. Our evaluation demonstrates that thermal attacks can cause local hotspots, and even worse lead to cooling failures.