Virtual Machine Allocation Policies against Co-resident Attacks in Cloud Computing

Abstract

While the services-based model of cloud computing makes more and more IT resources available to a wider range of customers, the massive amount of data in cloud platforms is becoming a target for malicious users. Previous studies show that attackers can co-locate their virtual machines (VMs) with target VMs on the same server, and obtain sensitive information from the victims using side channels. This paper investigates VM allocation policies and practical countermeasures against this novel kind of co-resident attack by developing a set of security metrics and a quantitative model. A security analysis of three VM allocation policies commonly used in existing cloud computing platforms reveals ..