Securing virtual machine images of cloud by encryption through Kerberos

The rapid growth of virtualization in cloud computing has attracted organizations to adopt this technology for its cost-effectiveness, ease of deployment and high availability of resources. Ensuring the security of virtual machine images is a big concern to cloud providers as well as the corporations which own applications and servers in cloud. Industry and academia has conducted extensive research to ensure the security of virtualized cloud environment. Any compromise of disk images can result in loss of data confidentiality and integrity. There are lots of security threats related to the retrieval and storing of virtual machine (VM) images into cloud storage. Kerberos protocol has been used in many areas for its superior authentication and authorization services. This paper proposes a novel security architecture for the protection of stored virtual machine images in clouds by employing encryption, decryption mechanisms and Kerberos.