A survey on memory deduplication employed in cloud computing

Abstract

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) type cloud computing uses a large number of virtual machines. The efficiency of virtual machines is directly connected to the tariff of cloud computing. To improve the efficiency, memory deduplication is used. Memory deduplication merges same contents of memory pages on a physical machine, allowing more virtual machines to run on limited memory resources. This memory deduplication is subjected to memory disclosure attack i.e. a merged page has to be recreated when a write access is given to that page. This technique can be used by any malicious virtual machine which can gain access another victim virtual machines' data. This paper presents a survey on memory deduplication, threats, attacks, limitations imposed on memory deduplication by Guest OS and other related works on memory deduplication.