Virtual Machine Security Problems and Countermeasures for Improving Quality of Service in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is widely used across industries due to its benefits such as scalability, availability and powerful resource integration. Though it is based on a cost model, it became affordable due to virtualization technology. However, it has caused many security issues both at Hypervisor (HV) level and Virtual Machine (VM) level. Security issues arise due to vulnerabilities that are exploited by adversaries to launch different kinds of attacks leading to deterioration of Quality of Service (QoS) in cloud computing. Apart from virtualization related security issues, cloud computing has evidenced data level and communication level security challenges. This paper focuses on the attacks and countermeasures that are associated with virtualization. Also, the proposed research work provides useful insights on the current state of the art and find challenges to be addressed with respect to three kinds of attacks. They are known as VM side channel attack that involves a class of attacks due to shared usage of hardware by VMs, hypervisor attacks occur due to compromised VMs and attacks targeting VM live migration exploiting dynamic VM allocation schemes. The findings in this paper motivate in further investigation into these specific attacks to improve the state of the art.