A Study on Security Vulnerability on Cloud Platforms

Abstract

Cloud computing provides an in-built platform to the users with easy and on-demand access to different system level services for creating virtual machines (VM) with efficient utilization of hardware, computing and network resources. This allows users to remotely execute large number of applications across various domains such as, health-care, utility services, e-governance, etc. There are different cloud operating platforms for creation and management of virtual machines through various system or application services. For example, openstack, oracle virtualbox, Microsoft HyperV are widely used operating platform. Virtual machine migration (VMM) is one of such important system services that used for smooth the progress of system maintenance, load management, fault tolerance, secure and safe service offerings. Virtual Machine live migration service transfers an active VM from one physical machine to another across different data centres. It involves a sequence of operations in iteration for migrating execution context of a VM to the destination machine. These operations are dependent on schedule, availability of resources and overall timing constraints. On the other hand, the migration process involves transferring the control data over a communication channel with a shared storage. Due to the above mentioned complexities of VM migration process, any security failures during the migration may cause transfer of incorrect VM instance to a data centre and which in turn may lead to exposure of the data centre to the attackers. This may be manifested as catastrophic system failure, degradation of system performance, load balancing and in long run may result collapse of the data centre. In this paper we studied various security vulnerability in different cloud platforms. These vulnerability will help the security developers to design a secured cloud platform.