Integrated Security Architecture for Virtual Machines

Abstract

Currently virtualisation technology is being deployed widely and there is an increasing interest on virtualisation based security techniques. There is a need for securing the life cycle of the virtual machine based systems. In this paper, we propose an integrated security architecture that combines access control, intrusion detection and trust management. We demonstrate how this integrated security architecture can be used to secure the life cycle of virtual machines including dynamic hosting and allocation of resources as well as migration of virtual machines across different physical servers. We discuss the implementation aspects of the proposed architecture and show how the architecture can counteract attack scenarios involving malicious users exploiting vulnerabilities to achieve privilege escalation and then using the compromised machines to generate further attacks.