Denial-of-Service Threat to Hadoop/YARN Clusters with Multi-tenancy

This paper studies the vulnerability of unconstrained computing resources in Hadoop and the threat of denial-of-service to a Hadoop cluster with multitenancy. We model the problem of how many nodes in a Hadoop cluster can be invaded by a malicious user with given allocated capacity as a k-ping-pong balls to n-boxes problem, and solve the problem by simulation. We construct a discrete event simulation model to estimate MapReduce job completion time in a Hadoop cluster under a DoS attack. Our study shows that even a small amount of compromised capacity may be used to launch a DoS attack and cause significant impacts on the performance of a Hadoop/YARN cluster.