Stealth migration: Hiding virtual machines on the network
Stefan Achleitner, Thomas La Porta, Patrick Drew McDaniel, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Alex Poylisher, Cristina Şerban · 2017
Live virtual machine (VM) migration is commonly used for enabling dynamic resource or fault management, or for load balancing in datacenters or cloud platforms. A service hosted by a VM may also be migrated to prevent its visibility to an external adversary who may seek to disrupt its operation by launching a DDoS attack against it. We first show that current systems cannot adequately hide a VM migration from an external adversary. The key reason for this is that a migration typically manifests a traffic pattern with distinguishable statistical properties. We introduce two new attacks that can allow an adversary to effectively track a migration in progress, by leveraging observations of these properties. As our primary contribution, we design and implement a stealth migration framework that causes migration traffic to be indistinguishable from regular Internet traffic, with a negligible latency overhead of approximately 0.37 seconds, on average.