Abstract:
Virtual Machine (VM) migration is one of the core features of Cloud, which is
mainly used for high availability, workload balancing, hardware maintenance
and fault takeover. It is used by private Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for
the migration of VM on the public Cloud when the demand for computa-
tional resources increases. However, VM migration has severe security issues
and it is prone to active and passive attacks. By exploiting the vulnerabil-
ities of the migration process, attacker can launch attacks on availability,
integrity and con dentiality of the VM data by illegally accessing or adding
malicious code to VM images. Therefore, CSPs are reluctant to use this im-
portant feature, especially when the VM contains sensitive data. Previously,
security aspects in the VM migration process were not completely explored;
therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive system for secure migration
of VM in the Cloud environment which provides security features such as
authorization, con dentiality, replay protection, integrity, mutual authenti-
cation and source non-repudiation with negligible modi cations in existing
infrastructure. We have carried out a thorough security requirement analysis
of the VM migration process. We have enhanced the key manager of Cloud
provider which now o ers new features for the management and storage of
keys involved in the SV2M solution. In addition, we have also incorporated
the SV2M in a widely-used open source Cloud platform, and have evaluated
the SV2M system with respect to performance and security.
