More Than Old Wine in New Bottles: A Secure Live Virtual Machine Job Migration Framework for Cloud Systems Integrity

Abstract

Cloud Computing is a flexible, cost-effective, and proven delivery platform for providing information technology services over the Internet. However, cloud computing presents an added level of risk because essential services are often outsourced to a third party, which makes it harder to maintain data security and privacy, support data and service availability, and demonstrate compliance.While existing cloud computing threat detection and prevention techniques are improving, they are still not effective enough to meet the needs of next-generation systems, such as secure dynamic resource pools, high usability, and secure virtual machine migration. This paper aims to provide an understanding of the different potential attack vectors created by virtualization in a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, in particular, the security associated with the live virtual machine migration of jobs. The vectors will be investigated, concentrating on the threats emerging from various potential attackers (internal/external) to cloud systems. The overarching aim of this study, therefore, is to design and develop a secure live virtual machine migration framework that enables a virtual trusted platform module for multiple virtual machines running on a hardware platform while maintaining the cloud system’s integrity.