Security Strategy for Virtual Machine Allocation in Cloud Computing

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In the cloud infrastructure, the co-resident attack is a critical security threat. Through virtualization technology provided by Cloud Service Provider, tenants’ virtual machines (VMs) are possible to be allocated on the same host. Multi-tenant environment provides malicious tenants an opportunity to launch the co-resident attack and steal other tenants’ information by side channels. To prevent this type of attack, previous works mostly pay attention to eliminating side channels and few of them study VM deployment strategy. Hence, we focus on deploying VMs with a secure and effective allocation strategy to reduce the probability of VM co-residence. A novel VM allocation strategy is proposed with three optimization objectives including security, load balancing and energy consumption. Finally, we implement our VM allocation strategy and prove its effectiveness on the simulation platform CloudSim.