WaveSurfer - Scheduling Irregular Pulsing Attacks on Microservice Autoscaling
Navidreza Asadi, Răzvan-Mihai Ursu, Johannes Zerwas, Leon Wong, Wolfgang Kellerer · 2025
Microservice autoscaling balances service quality and operational costs through heuristic-based solutions that often overlook robustness. We adopt an adversarial perspective to expose vulnerabilities in autoscaling by identifying a seconds-scale irregular pulsing pattern. It comes with a traffic-aware attack scheduler that significantly outperforms traditional uniform DoS and existing pulsing attacks. Our proposed attack, which we call WaveSurfer, can exploit benign traffic patterns to increase attack effectiveness by up to 5.3×. This work highlights the urgent need for robust autoscaling mechanisms that can withstand sophisticated adversarial patterns.