Virtualization vulnerabilities, security issues, and solutions: a critical study and comparison

Abstract

Virtualization is technological revolution that separates functions from underlying hardware and allows us to create useful environment from abstract resources. Virtualization technology has been targeted by attackers for malicious activity. Attackers could compromise VM infrastructures, allowing them to access other VMs on the same system and even the host. Our article emphasize on the assessment of virtualization specific vulnerabilities, security issues and possible solutions. In this article, a recent comprehensive survey on virtualization threats and vulnerabilities is presented. We also described taxonomy of cloud-based attacks on the virtualized system and existing defense mechanisms intended to help academia, industry and researchers to gain deeper and valuable insights into the attacks so that the associated vulnerabilities can be identified and subsequently required actions would be taken. We provide an exhaustive comparison of various techniques proposed by researchers to resolve virtualization specific vulnerabilities. To guide future research, we discussed generalized security measures and requirements to be taken to achieve secure virtualized implementations. At the end, we shed some light on cloud shared responsibility model to decide which roles cloud service providers and cloud service customers play in cloud security. The aim of this article is to deliver researchers, academicians and industry with a superior understanding of existing attacks and defense mechanisms on cloud security.