Multilateral Security Architecture for Virtualization platform in multi-tenancy cloud environment

Abstract

Virtualization technologies enable multi-tenancy cloud business models by providing a scalable, shared resource platform for all tenants. Computing capacity, storage, and network are shared between multi-tenants. However, placing different customers' workloads on the same virtualization platform may lead to security vulnerabilities, which include the failure of mechanisms separating storage, memory, routing, and even reputation between different tenants of the shared infrastructure. The co-location of many customers inevitably causes conflict for the cloud provider as customers' communication security requirements are likely to be divergent from each other. In this paper, we introduce Multi-lateral Security concept to multi-tenancy cloud platform. It is difficult to analyze policies defined by consumers in the same virtualization platform in order to guarantee configuration stability given that policies may have conflicts leading to unpredictable effects. We present the Multilateral Security Architecture for Virtualization platform (VPMS) which enables the multilateral security for consumers.