Detecting Virtualization Specific Vulnerabilities in Cloud Computing Environment
Guodong Zhu, Yue Yin, Ruoyan Cai, Kang Li · 2017
As the enabling technology, virtualization plays an important role in cloud computing by providing the capability of running multiple operating systems and applications on top of the same underlying hardware. Early detection of vulnerability in virtualization is vital for virtualization performance and to protect against attacks that may lead to information leak or virtual machine(VM) escape. While current bug finding tools can detect common flaws in software implementation, many of the virtualization vulnerabilities are unique to cloud platform and can hardly be addressed by existing techniques. The discovery of these vulnerabilities often requires specific domain knowledge and a significant amount of manual effort. In this paper, we conducted analyses of known vulnerabilities disclosed in recent years in different virtualization platforms, studied the differences between vulnerabilities in virtualization and traditional software vulnerabilities and categorized them into different groups. Based on the analyses, we propose to detect these vulnerabilities by extending symbolic execution techniques and designed a detection framework for virtualization platforms which can detect bugs in virtualization implementations.