Computer meteorology: monitoring compute clouds
Lionel Litty, H. Andrés Lagar-Cavilla, David Lie · 2009
Cloud computing environments allow customers to execute arbitrary code on hardware owned by a cloud provider. While cloudprovidersuse virtualizationto ensure isolation between customers, they face additional security challenges. Malicious customers may leverage the provider’s hardware to launch attacks, either from VMs they own or by compromising VMs from benign customers. Theseattackscandamagetheprovider’sreputationandabilitytoserveothercustomers. Inthispaper weshowthatwhilecloudproviderscanuseintrospection tomonitorcustomerVMsanddetectmaliciousactivity,it mustbeusedwithcaresinceexistingintrospectiontechniquesarebasedonassumptionsthatdonotholdincloud environments. 1