Secure VM placement analysis against co-location based attack in cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing is most popular platform for IT industries provides numerous benefits to cloud computing users. Day by day increasing the number of users on cloud so security is a most important issue. Virtual machine co-residency and resource sharing rise chance to leak sensitive information, lack of restrictions for placement of virtual machine on same host machine, increase the chance for an attacker to conducting co-location based attack on neighbor virtual machine that running on same host machine. Without security scheme placement of VM in cloud environment may increase chance to thieve confidential information by the attackers. In this paper, we analyze the existing VM placement scheme against cross VM side channel attack. We categorized side channel attack (SCA) according to access of hardware and way to extract the confidential information. We have also done comparative study of VM placement scheme on the basis of previous history of user, number of VM placed and average running time of VM on cloud.

Subject Classification:

• 91G20
• 68-XX
• 03D78
• 60K30

Keywords:

• VM security
• Placement
• Co-location based attack
• Virtualization