An empirical study of thermal attacks on edge platforms

Abstract

Cloud-edge systems are vulnerable to thermal attacks as the increased energy consumption may remain undetected, while occurring alongside normal, CPU-intensive applications. The purpose of our research is to study thermal effects on modern edge systems. We also analyze how performance is affected from the increased heat and identify preventative measures. We speculate that due to the technology being a recent innovation, research on cloud-edge devices and thermal attacks is scarce. Other research focuses on server systems rather than edge platforms. In our paper, we use a Raspberry Pi 4 and a CPU-intensive application to represent thermal attacks on cloud-edge systems. We performed several experiments with the Raspberry Pi 4 and used stress-ng, a benchmarking tool available on Linux distributions, to simulate the attacks. The resulting effects displayed drastic increases in the temperature and power consumption. The key impact of our research is to highlight the following risks and mitigation plans: the vulnerability of cloud-edge systems from thermal attacks, the capability for the attacks to go unnoticed, to further the understanding of edge devices as well as the prevention of these attacks.