Preventing Information Leakage from Virtual Machines' Memory in IaaS Clouds

Abstract

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides virtual machines (VMs) to the users and its system administrators often manage the user VMs using privileged VMs called the management VM. However, the administrators are not always trustworthy from users' point of view. If the administrators allow outside attackers to intrude in the management VM, the attackers can easily steal sensitive information from user VMs' memory. In this paper, we propose VMCrypt, which preserves the data secrecy of VMs' memory using the trusted virtual machine monitor. VMCrypt provides a dual memory view: a normal view for a user VM and an encrypted view for the management VM. The encrypted view prevents sensitive information from leaking to the management VM. To support the existing management software for para-virtualization, VMCrypt exceptionally provides a normal view to the management VM only for several memory regions, which are automatically identified and maintained during the life cycle of a user VM. We have implemented VMCrypt in Xen and our experimental results show that the downtime due to live migration was still less than one second.