Abstract
Security and privacy concern is still one of the major issues that prevent users from moving to public clouds. Introduction of security services based on virtual machine introspection into cloud does not relieve this situation, because these services are inflexible and untrusted by tenants. The root cause of the problem is that the cloud administrator has more privilege over the security services, which leaves no options for the tenants to protect their virtual machines. In this paper, we propose a technique to decouple security services from cloud platform via remote virtual machine introspection. It enables remote trusted managed security services to protect tenants’ virtual machines stealthily. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype with Xen hypervisor, called SE-Cloud. With the separation of introspection and security-business code, the security services can not be abused by administrators and have little impact on the management virtual machine. Our preliminary experimental results show that SE-Cloud can provide more robust and flexible protections for tenant virtual machines with acceptable overhead.
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Notes
- 1.
XEN: http://www.xen.org.
- 2.
- 3.
VMware: http://www.vmware.com/.
- 4.
Available online, https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility.
- 5.
Available online, http://ebtables.sourceforge.net/.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on improving this paper. In this paper, the research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61402508 and 61303191. The research also supported by National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863) under Grant No. 2015AA016010.
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Zhou, H., Ba, H., Ren, J., Wang, Y., Wang, Z., Li, Y. (2017). Decoupling Security Services from IaaS Cloud Through Remote Virtual Machine Introspection. In: Wang, G., Atiquzzaman, M., Yan, Z., Choo, KK. (eds) Security, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage. SpaCCS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10656. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72389-1_41
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