Security Challenges for Modern Data Centers with IoT: A Preliminary Study.

The wide deployment of internet of things (IoT) devices makes a profound impact on the data center industry from various perspectives, varying from infrastructure operation, resource management, to end users. This is a double-edged sword – it enables ubiquitous resource monitoring and intelligent management therefore significantly enhances the efficiency of daily operation while introducing new security issues for modern data centers. The emerging security challenges are not only related to detecting new IoT attacks or vulnerabilities but also including the implementations of cybersecurity protection mechanisms (e.g., intrusion detection system, vulnerability management system) to enhance data center security. As the new security challenges with IoT have not been thoroughly explored in the literature, this paper provides a survey on the most recent IoT security issues regarding modern data centers by highlighting IoT attacks and the trend of newly discovered vulnerabilities. We find that vulnerabilities related to data center management system have increased significantly since 2019. Compared to the total amount in 2018 (with 25 vulnerabilities), the number of data center management system vulnerabilities almost increased by a factor of four times (with 98 vulnerabilities) in 2020. This paper also introduces the existing cybersecurity tools and discusses the associated challenges and research issues for enhancing data center security.