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CloudVisor: Retrofitting protection of virtual machines in multi-tenant cloud with nested virtualization (2011)
| Venue: | IN PROC. OF ACM SOSP, CAS CAIS, PORTUGAL, |
| Citations: | 77 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Zhang11cloudvisor:retrofitting,
author = {Fengzhe Zhang and Jin Chen and Haibo Chen and Binyu Zang},
title = {CloudVisor: Retrofitting protection of virtual machines in multi-tenant cloud with nested virtualization},
booktitle = {IN PROC. OF ACM SOSP, CAS CAIS, PORTUGAL,},
year = {2011},
publisher = {}
}
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Abstract
Multi-tenant cloud, which usually leases resources in the form of virtual machines, has been commercially available for years. Unfortunately, with the adoption of commodity virtualized infrastructures, software stacks in typical multi-tenant clouds are non-trivially large and complex, and thus are prone to compromise or abuse from adversaries including the cloud operators, which may lead to leakage of security-sensitive data. In this paper, we propose a transparent, backward-compatible approach that protects the privacy and integrity of customers ’ virtual machines on commodity virtualized infrastructures, even facing a total compromise of the virtual machine monitor (VMM) and the management VM. The key of our approach is the separation of the resource management from security protection in the virtualization layer. A tiny security monitor is introduced underneath the commodity VMM using nested virtualization and provides protection to the hosted VMs. As a result, our approach allows virtualization software (e.g., VMM, management VM and tools) to handle complex tasks of managing leased VMs for the cloud, without breaking security of users ’ data inside the VMs. We have implemented a prototype by leveraging commercially-available hardware support for virtualization. The prototype system, called CloudVisor, comprises only 5.5K LOCs and supports the Xen VMM with multiple Linux and Windows as the guest OSes. Performance evaluation shows that CloudVisor incurs moderate slowdown for I/O intensive applications and very small slowdown for other applications.
Keyphrases
virtual machine nested virtualization multi-tenant cloud management vm virtualization layer xen vmm intensive application moderate slowdown multiple linux complex task commercially-available hardware support software stack typical multi-tenant cloud user data guest os security protection virtualization software security-sensitive data prototype system resource management tiny security monitor performance evaluation commodity vmm cloud operator small slowdown total compromise virtual machine monitor customer virtual machine backward-compatible approach
