Experimenting on virtual machines co-residency in the cloud
Abdulaziz Alabdulhafez, Paul Ezhilchelvan · 2014
Cloud computing aims to provide users with instant, on-demand access to large pools of computational resources. Although many organizations and end-users have migrated services and data to the cloud, a number of security concerns still exist. In particular, recent researches have highlighted virtual machine (VM) co-residency as a new risk brought to the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud by virtualization technologies which form the core of IaaS platforms. The placement of an attacker's virtual machine (VM) on the same physical server as a victim's VM is the key to successfully launching several harmful side-channel attacks to gain sensitive and valuable information about the co-residing VMs. When such placement manifests in a malicious manner then it is called VM co-residency. In this paper a number of cloud platforms and software tools are evaluated on their suitability as test beds for experimenting on VM co-residency. This study leads to a recommendation for implementing a purpose-built simulator which can be used as a test bed for future research on VM co-residency in the cloud.