Understanding Real-World Vulnerabilities in Distributed Cloud Systems

istributed cloud systems are facing great security challenges because of widely-existing vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are often easily exploitable, leading to numerous cloud breaches. In this paper, we present VulCloud, the most comprehensive study on 243 vulnerabilities from 16 widely-deployed distributed cloud systems. Each vulnerability is studied in depth along 5 dimensions: root causes, triggering conditions, security impacts,  observability, and fixing strategies. From our study, we obtain many interesting findings that can open up new research directions for combating vulnerabilities in distributed systems.