Evaluating Network-Based DoS Attacks under the Energy Consumption Perspective: New Security Issues in the Coming Green ICT Area

In the green Information and Communication Society (ICS), new form of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks may be put in place: exploiting the computational and storage resources of datacenters with the aim of consuming as much energy as possible, causing detrimental effects, from high costs in the energy bill, to penalization for exceeding the agreed quantity of CO₂ emissions, up to complete denial of service due to power outages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper which investigates the impacts of network-based DoS attacks under the energy consumption perspective. We analyzed different types of such attacks with their impacts on the energy consumption, and showed that current energy-aware technologies may provide attackers with great opportunities for raising the target facility energy consumption and consequently its green house gases (GHG) emissions and costs.