Defending co‐resident attack using reputation‐based virtual machine deployment policy in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing enables users to utilize IT resources conveniently with low‐level cost, but it also brings some new threats. The co‐resident attack is one of the typical examples, where malicious users steal information from legal users by starting a virtual machine (VM) and building a side‐channel between VMs on the same server. Most of current studies focus mainly on defending the side‐channel attack, which requires modifications to the existing underlying architecture of cloud platforms. Some studies focus on security‐aware VMs deployment policies that can defeat co‐resident attacks through reduction of co‐residences. However, most of these studies ignore workload‐balance and energy‐efficiency. In addition, they neglect that data held in different VMs should have different security levels. Motivated by these issues, in this article, we first formalize the multi‐attackers co‐resident attack problem. The co‐located VMs rate (CVR) metric is proposed to evaluate the security level in cloud and a security‐aware policy named least‐danger‐based‐on‐reputation (LDBR) is presented to minimize the metric. Also, we propose extensional LDBR (E‐LDBR) policy to balance security, workload‐balance and energy consumption, and weighted‐LDBR (W‐LDBR) policy that considers users' different security levels. Experimental results indicate that LDBR outperforms PSSF (previous‐selected‐server‐first) by 15.02%‐22.07% in security, E‐LDBR is more balanced in workload and consumes less energy consumption, and W‐LDBR can reduce security threats by 13.3% compared with PSSF.

Minimal cut of strongly connected directed random graphs studied in virtual machine deployment

“…The literature [11] proposed a dynamic VM deployment strategy that utilizes a multi-objective optimization algorithm to deploy and adjust VMs dynamically. The literature [12] proposed a reputation-based VM deployment strategy to reduce the risk of coexistence attacks by evaluating the reputation of VMs and deploying VMs with high reputations on the same physical host. The literature [13] compared the impact of different VM deployment policies on the efficiency of data processing centers through simulation experiments, and he concluded that different VM deployment policies significantly affect the performance and resource utilization efficiency of data processing centers.…”

Moving-Target Defense in Depth: Pervasive Self- and Situation-Aware VM Mobilization across Federated Clouds in Presence of Active Attacks

“…A good example is cross side-channel attacks that exploit isolation vulnerabilities to cross the logical boundaries separating VMs sharing the same physical host resources. Attackers usually exploit their presence on the same host hosting the victim’s virtual machine, construct a side-channel attack and access sensitive data [ 3 , 4 ].…”

Multi‐channel attack detection based on lightweight message authentication code access control using Internet of Things design

“…Cloud computing allows consumers to access IT resources quickly and at a cheap cost, but it also introduces certain new dangers. One such example is the co‐resident attack, in which malevolent users launch a virtual machine (VM) and create a side‐channel between VMs on the same server to steal information from legitimate users 3 . Although the cloud computing paradigm accommodates large quantities of IoT clusters data, the transmission of large quantities of data from and to cloud computers is a problem as bandwidth is small.…”

“…One such example is the co-resident attack, in which malevolent users launch a virtual machine (VM) and create a side-channel between VMs on the same server to steal information from legitimate users. 3 Although the cloud computing paradigm accommodates large quantities of IoT clusters data, the transmission of large quantities of data from and to cloud computers is a problem as bandwidth is small. The processing of data near the data source is therefore important and fog computing offers a promising solution to that problem.…”