Enhancing Multi-tenancy Security in the Cloud IaaS Model over Public Deployment
Hussain Lafi H AlJahdali, Paul Townend, Jie Xu · 2013
Cloud Computing can be seen as an instance of Computing as a Utility, where customers utilize the concept of "pay-as-you-go" for applications, computing and storage resources. This concept is utilized particularly heavily in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models. In IaaS Clouds, customers can instantly be allocated - and subsequently release - Virtual Machines (VMs). To achieve easy management and better performance, Cloud providers utilize automated resource allocation techniques, which results in some cases of having two or more VMs belonging to different customers residing in the same physical machine. The situation described above is known as Multi-Tenancy and could lead to confidentiality violation. Since Multi-tenancy heavily depends on resource allocation, we propose a resource allocation technique which considers security as a requirement. In most cases resource allocation techniques consider, but are not limited to, either performance or power consumption but not security. So, by making resource allocation techniques consider security by design, we can enhance Multi-tenancy security which will in turn positively impact Cloud Computing Security.