A concurrent security monitoring method for virtualization environments

Abstract

Recently, virtualization technologies have been widely used in industry. In order to monitor the security of target systems in virtualization environments, conventional methods usually put the security monitoring mechanism into the normal functionality of the target systems. However, these methods are either prone to be tempered by attackers or introduce considerable performance overhead for target systems. To address these problems, in this paper, we present a concurrent security monitoring method which decouples traditional serial mechanisms, including security event collector and analyzer, into two concurrent components. On one hand, we utilize the SIM framework to deploy the event collector into the target virtual machine. On the other hand, we combine the virtualization technology and multi-core technology to put the event analyzer into a trusted execution environment. To address the synchronization problem between these two concurrent components, we make use of Lamport's ring buffer algorithm. Based on the Xen hypervisor, we have implemented a prototype system named COMO. The experimental results show that COMO can monitor the security of the target virtual machine concurrently within a little performance overhead.