Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power grid

AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. 

The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimate cloud tenant to launch GPU workloads that have the potential to damage datacenters and supporting electrical systems. It’s intended to demonstrate the need to extend cybersecurity defenses to datacenter workload scheduling.

The researchers, Zhouhao Ji, Kaikai Pan, and Wenyuan Xu, from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, describe their technique in a preprint paper titled “Bit2Watt: A Cyber-Physical Vulnerability Exploiting GPU Workloads Across Power and Computing Infrastructures.”

Read more at The Register