CloRExPa: Cloud resilience via execution path analysis

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest around cloud concepts, current cloud technologies and services related to security are not mature enough to enable a more widespread industrial acceptance of cloud systems. Providing an adequate level of resilience to cloud services is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the environment as well as the need for efficient solutions that could preserve cloud benefits over other solutions. In this paper we provide the architectural design, implementation details, and performance results for a customizable resilience service solution for cloud guests. This solution leverages execution path analysis. In particular, we propose an architecture that can trace, analyze and control live virtual machine activity as well as intervened code and data modifications—possibly due to either malicious attacks or software faults. Execution path analysis allows the virtual machine manager (VMM) to trace the VM state and to prevent such a guest from reaching faulty states. We evaluated the effectiveness and performance trade-off of our prototype on a real cloud test bed. Experimental results support the viability of the proposed solution.