Kumo: A Security-Focused Serverless Cloud Simulator
Wei Shao, Khaled Khasawneh, Setareh Rafatirad, Houman Homayoun, and Chongzhou Fang

TL;DR
Kumo is a specialized simulator that enables detailed, reproducible security analysis of serverless platforms, focusing on risks like co-location and denial-of-service, which are hard to study on real systems.
Contribution
Kumo introduces a security-centric simulation framework for serverless computing, modeling attacker-victim interactions and system behaviors to analyze security risks systematically.
Findings
Scheduler choice significantly impacts co-location attack risks.
Resource contention influences denial-of-service vulnerabilities.
System-level factors like queuing and capacity affect attack severity.
Abstract
Serverless computing abstracts infrastructure management but also obscures system-level behaviors that can introduce security risks. Prior work has shown that serverless platforms are vulnerable to attacks exploiting shared execution environments, including attacker--victim co-location and denial-of-service through resource contention, yet analyzing these risks on production platforms is difficult due to limited observability, high cost, and lack of experimental control, while existing simulators primarily focus on performance and cost rather than security. We present Kumo, a security-focused simulator for serverless platforms that enables controlled, reproducible analysis of security risks arising from scheduling and resource sharing decisions. Kumo models invocation arrivals, scheduler placement, container reuse, resource contention, and queuing within a discrete-event framework,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Software System Performance and Reliability
