Survey on secure live virtual machine (VM) migration in Cloud

Abstract

The core of Cloud computing includes virtualization of hardware resources such as storage, network and memory provided through virtual machines (VM). The live migration of these VMs is introduced to obtain multiple benefits which mainly include high availability, hardware maintenance, fault takeover and workload balancing. Besides various facilities of the VM migration, it is susceptible to severe security risks during migration process due to which the industry is hesitant to accept it. The research done so far is on the performance of migration process; whereas the security aspects in migration are not fully explored. We have carried out an extensive survey to investigate the vulnerabilities, threats and possible attacks on the live VM migration. Furthermore, we have identified security requirements for secure VM migration and presented a detailed analysis of existing solutions on the basis of these security requirements. Finally, limitations in the existing solutions are presented.