{"title":"Experimenting on virtual machines co-residency in the cloud: a comparative study of available test beds","authors":"Abdulaziz Alabdulhafez, P. Ezhilchelvan","doi":"10.1145/2554850.2555105","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Cloud computing aims to provide users with instant, on-demand access to large pools of computational resources. Although many organizations and end-users have migrated services and data to the cloud, a number of security concerns still exist. In particular, recent researches have highlighted virtual machine (VM) co-residency as a new risk brought to the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud by virtualization technologies which form the core of IaaS platforms. The placement of an attacker's virtual machine (VM) on the same physical server as a victim's VM is the key to successfully launching several harmful side-channel attacks to gain sensitive and valuable information about the co-residing VMs. When such placement manifests in a malicious manner then it is called VM co-residency. In this paper a number of cloud platforms and software tools are evaluated on their suitability as test beds for experimenting on VM co-residency. This study leads to a recommendation for implementing a purpose-built simulator which can be used as a test bed for future research on VM co-residency in the cloud.","PeriodicalId":285655,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2014-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2554850.2555105","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Cloud computing aims to provide users with instant, on-demand access to large pools of computational resources. Although many organizations and end-users have migrated services and data to the cloud, a number of security concerns still exist. In particular, recent researches have highlighted virtual machine (VM) co-residency as a new risk brought to the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud by virtualization technologies which form the core of IaaS platforms. The placement of an attacker's virtual machine (VM) on the same physical server as a victim's VM is the key to successfully launching several harmful side-channel attacks to gain sensitive and valuable information about the co-residing VMs. When such placement manifests in a malicious manner then it is called VM co-residency. In this paper a number of cloud platforms and software tools are evaluated on their suitability as test beds for experimenting on VM co-residency. This study leads to a recommendation for implementing a purpose-built simulator which can be used as a test bed for future research on VM co-residency in the cloud.