V-MLR: A Multilevel Security Model for Virtualization

Abstract

As the infrastructure of cloud computing, the virtualization security problem has become more severe since the security requirement of different virtual machines (VMs) may conflict with the others in could computing platform. Based on the mandatory access control mechanism, a new mulitlevel security access control model V-MLR is proposed, which not only provided secure communication mechanism for virtual machine monitor (VMM) and VMs, but also updated the borrowed information in VMM synchronously when it was changed in VMs. Case study and application in Xen showed that V-MLR enhanced the security of virtual machine system without causing significant performance penalty.