Nodeguard: A Virtualized Introspection Security Approach for the Modern Cloud Data Center
Maha Shamseddine, Auday Al-Dulaimy, Wassim Itani, Thomas Nolte, Alessandro V. Papadopoulos · 2022 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid) · 2022
This paper presents Nodeguard, a security approach for detecting and isolating misbehaving Virtual Machines (VMs) in multi-tenant virtualized cloud data centers, based on the Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) monitoring primitives. Nodeguard employs a divide-and-conquer strategy that checks logical groups of VMs to ensure the efficiency of the detection mechanisms which opportunistically approaches a complexity of$\mathcal{O}(\log_{2}(n))$when there is a relatively low number of hostile VMs. This greatly enhances the algorithmic time complexity of the pro-posed security system compared to the$\mathcal{O}(n)$complexity achieved by the traditional VMI inspection strategy that checks each VM separately. The approach has been evaluated in a virtualized cloud environment using the Mininet network emulator.