Experimenting on virtual machines co-residency in the cloud: A Comparative Study of Available Test Beds

Alabdulhafez, A; Ezhilchelvan, P

doi:10.1145/2554850.2555105

Experimenting on virtual machines co-residency in the cloud: A Comparative Study of Available Test Beds

Lookup NU author(s): Abdulaziz Alabdulhafez, Dr Paul Ezhilchelvan ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by ACM, 2014.

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Abstract

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) coresidency 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 coresidency in the cloud.