Protection by Detection: A Signaling Game Approach to Mitigate Co-Resident Attacks in Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing is taking the technology world by storm because of the varieties of services offered by the cloud service providers (CSPs). Despite numerous benefits offered by CSPs, there are some security issues that may dissuade users from using it. In this service, different virtual machines (VMs) share the same physical resources, these VMs are known as co-resident VMs. The shared physical resources pose a significant threat to the users. As resources may belong to competing organizations as well as unknown attackers. From the perspective of a cloud user, there is no guarantee whether the co-resident VMs are trustworthy. The shared resources make privacy and perfect isolation implausible, which paves the way for co-resident attacks, where a VM attacks another co-resident VM. There is a risk that a covert side channel can be used to extract another user's secret information or launch denial of service attacks. In this paper, we analyze the co-resident attacks and corresponding defense strategies, with respect to benign and malicious VMs and the VM Monitor (VMM), using a signaling game model, named Co-resident Attacks Mitigation and Prevention. The solution to the game provides optimal defense strategies for the VMM. We evaluate the game results by conducting simulation and find that the defender can fail co-resident attacks effectively by distinguishing the benign and malicious VMs efficiently.