International Journal of Computer Science Engineering

and Information Technology Research (IJCSEITR)

ISSN(P): 2249-6831; ISSN(E): 2249-7943
Vol. 4, Issue 5, Oct 2014, 107-116
TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

SECURITY CONCERN FOR VIRTUALIZATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING

GAYATRI SHITANSHU KAPADIA1 & RAVI M. GULATI2
1

Assistant Professor, Department of Master in Computer Application,

Sarvajanik College of Engineering & Technology, Surat, Gujarat, India

2

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, Gujarat, India

ABSTRACT
Cloud computing has become known as today's most thrilling computing standard shift in information technology
arena. With the efficient sharing of abundant computing resources in the cloud, users can economically enjoy the
on-demand high quality cloud applications and services without committing large capital outlays locally. The cloud is a
virtualization of resources that maintains and manages itself. Cloud can exist without Virtualization, although it is difficult
and inefficient. The Virtualization is gaining new goals and attracting those who need to perform the miracle of
multiplication, as it is to fit more information in less space. [1] Many of the features of virtualization offer both benefits
and disadvantages to security.
This paper is addressing about the virtualization which is one of the fundamental components of cloud computing,
types of virtualization specifically hardware virtualization and its approaches plus virtualization security aspects.

KEYWORDS: Virtualization, Hypervisor, Virtual Machine, Security, Guest Operating System

I. INTRODUCTION
Virtualization is a large umbrella of technologies and concepts that are meant to provide an abstract
environmentwhether virtual hardware or an operating systemto run applications. Moreover, virtualization technologies
provide a virtual environment for not only executing applications but also for storage, memory, and networking. [2] Most
of the current interest in virtualization revolves around virtual servers in part because virtualizing servers can result in
significant cost savings. Virtualization software allows a physical computing device to be electronically separated into one
or more "virtual" devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks.
Virtualization is the abstraction of computer resources which hides the physical characteristics of computing
resources from their users, by their applications or end users. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a
server, an operating system, an application or storage device) appear to function as multiple physical resources (such as
storage devices or servers) appear as a single Virtual Resource.

Figure 1: Virtualization Server for Multiple Applications or Operating Systems

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Hardware Virtualization: When we create a virtual machine over existing operating and hardware is called
Hardware Virtualization. Virtual Machines make available an environment that is logically separated from the underlying
hardware.
The machine on which the virtual machine (VM) is created is known as host machine and virtual machine is
referred as a guest machine. The VM is managed by a software or firmware or low-level, which is known as a
hypervisor acts as a Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).
There are two types of hypervisors:

Type 1 (Bare Metal) hypervisor runs on bare system. Examples LynxSecure, RTS Hypervisor, Oracle VM, Sun
xVM Server, Virtual Logic VLX [3]

Type 2 (Hosted) hypervisor is a software interface that emulates the devices with which a system normally
interacts. Examples are Containers, KVM, Microsoft Hyper V, VM Ware Fusion, Virtual Server 2005 R2,
Windows Virtual PC and VM Ware workstation 6.0 [3]

Figure 2: Full Virtualization Architectures

The type1 hypervisor does not have any host operating system because they are installed on a bare system
(bare system means a computer without its operating system).
Both VM types act like a real hardware.

II. Virtualization Approaches

In this section, there is discussion of types of virtualization specifically hardware virtualization, techniques for
X86 virtualization, hypervisor security, shared resources, public vm image repository, virtual machine roll back,
virtual machine life cycle and virtual networks.
A. Types of Virtualization

Virtual Memory

Desktop Virtualization

Hardware Virtualization

Storage Virtualization

Network Virtualization

Impact Factor (JCC): 6.8785

Index Coper nicus Value (ICV): 3.0

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Security Concern for Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Application Virtualization
Here I mainly focus on Hardware Virtualization which is mostly related to the cloud computing.

Hardware Virtualization

Full Virtualization

Emulation

Paravirtualization
Following Table 1 represents these types with diagrams and examples
Table 1: Types of Hardware Virtualization
3.1 Full Virtualization
The underlying hardware is
completely simulated. Guest
software does not require any
modification to run on. It needs
single machine that could be
multiplexed among many users.

Examples:
First
demonstrated
with IBM's CP-40
research system in
1967
Re-implemented
CP/CMS in IBM's VM
family from 1972 to
the present.
Each CP/CMS user
was
provided
a
simulated, stand-alone
computer.

3.2 Emulation

3.3 Paravirtualization

The virtual machine simulates the

hardware and hence become
independent of the it. In this, the
guest operating system does not
require modification.

The hardware is not simulated.

The guest software run their
own
Isolated domains.

Example:
Xen -- modified Linux kernel
and a version of Windows XP

B. Techniques for X86 Virtualization

After reviewing types of hardware virtualization, let us see an example of X 86 supports for virtualization in Table
2 as below:

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Table 2: Techniques for X86 Virtualization

Virtualization Types
Full
Virtualizatio
n with
Binary
Translation

Hardware
Assisted
Virtualization

OS Assisted
Virtualization /
Paravirtualization

Binary
Translation
and Direct
Execution

Exit to Root
Mode on
Privileged
Instructions

Hypercalls

Unmodified
Guest
OS
Excellent
compatibilit
y

Unmodified
Guest
OS
Excellent
compatibility

Guest OS codified
to issue Hyper
Calls so it can't run
on
Native
Hardware or other
Hypervisors Poor
compatibility; Not
available
on
Windows
Operating Systems.

Performance

Good

Fair
Current
performance lags
Binary
Translation
virtualizati-on on
various
workloads
but
will
improve
over time

Better in certain
cases

Used By

VMware,
Microsoft,
Parallels

VMware,
Microsoft,
Parallels, Xen

VMware, Xen

Yes

XenLinux
only
on
Hypervisor
Linux
Hypervisor
agnostic

Factors

Technique

Guest
Modification /
Compatibility

Guest
OS
Hypervisor
Independent?

Yes

runs
Xen
VMIis

C. Hypervisor Security
Hypervisors are software which are used to control virtual machines. It is also called a virtual machine monitor
(VMM). If an attacker compromises a hypervisor then he/she can able to access all underlying VMs. Hypervisor should be
simple so that it has minimum possibility of risks. For load balancing VMs may migrate between servers. This migration is
carried over the internet. This also exposes a weak link since expose content to network.
D. Shared Resources
With the help of hypervisor single server can handle large number Virtual Machines (VMs). These VMs in same
server share memory and other resources. Hence malicious VM can obtain information about other VMs without

Impact Factor (JCC): 6.8785

Index Coper nicus Value (ICV): 3.0

Security Concern for Virtualization in Cloud Computing

111

knowledge of the hypervisor. [4] Also according to [5] with the help of covert channels all the security rules by bypassed
by the VMs. Thus, a malicious Virtual Machine can monitor shared resources without being noticed by its VMM, so the
attacker can infer some information about other virtual machines.
E. Public VM Image Depository
In Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments, a VM image is a prepackaged software template containing the
configurations files that are used to create VMs.[6] Thus, these images are fundamental for the overall security of the
cloud. We can either create our own VM image from scratch, or we can use any image stored in the providers depository.
E. g

Amazon offers a public image depository where genuine users can download or upload a VM image. Malicious
users can store images containing malicious code into public depositories compromising other users or even the
cloud system.

An attacker with a valid account can create an image containing malicious code like Trojan horse. If another
customer uses this image, the VM of this customer will be infected with the hidden malware plus inadvertently
data leakage can be initiated by VM replication. And some confidential information such as passwords or
cryptographic keys can be recoded while an image is being created. If the image is soiled, this sensitive
information can be exposed to other users. (Note: VM images are hidden artifacts that are hard to patch while they
are offline.).

F. Virtual Machine Rollback

In addition, virtual machines are able to be rolled back to their previous states if an error happens. But rolling
back virtual machines can re-expose them to security vulnerabilities that were patched or re-enable previously disabled
accounts or passwords. For making available rollbacks, we need to make a copy or snapshot of the VM, which can result
in the proliferation of configuration errors and other vulnerabilities [7, 8].
G. Virtual Machine Life Cycle
Moreover, it is vital to understand the lifecycle of the VMs and their changes in states as they move through the
environment. VM can be on, off, or suspended which makes harder to detect malware. Even when VMs are offline,
they can be vulnerable [9]; i.e., a VM can be instantiated using an image that may contain malicious code. This malicious
image can be the initial point of the propagation of malware by injecting malicious code within other VMs in the creation
process.
H. Virtual Networks
Virtual Networks increase the VMs interconnectivity, an important security challenge in Cloud Computing [10].
The most secure way is to hook each VM with its host by using dedicated physical channels. However, most hypervisors
use virtual networks to link VMs to communicate more directly and efficiently. For instance, most virtualization platforms
such as Xen provide two ways to configure virtual networks: bridged and routed, but these techniques increase the
possibility to perform some attacks such as sniffing and spoofing virtual network [12, 11].

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III. VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY

Migrating computing resources to a virtualized environment has little or no effect on most of the resources
vulnerabilities and threats. E.g., if a service has inherent vulnerabilities and that service is moved from a non-virtualized
server to a virtualized server, the service is still just as vulnerable to exploitation. However, the use of virtualization may
help reduce the impact of such exploitationbut virtualization may also provide additional attack vectors, thus increasing
the likelihood of successful attacks. Many of the features of virtualization offer both benefits and disadvantages to security.
This section describes these security implications. Section A discusses the isolation of guest OSs from each other
and the underlying hypervisor and host OS. Section B explains the purpose of and mechanisms for guest OS monitoring.
Section C discusses image and snapshot management.
A. Guest OS Isolation
The hypervisor is responsible for managing guest OS access to hardware (e.g., CPU, memory, storage).
The hypervisor partitions these resources so that each guest OS can access its own resources but cannot encroach on the
other guest OSs resources or any resources not allocated for virtualization use. This prevents unauthorized access to
resources and also helps prevent one guest OS from injecting malware into another, such as infecting a guest OSs files or
placing malware code into another guest OSs memory. Separately, partitioning can also reduce the threat of denial of
service conditions caused by excess resource consumption in other guest OSs on the same hypervisor.
Resources may be partitioned physically or logically.
Table 3
Key Aspects

Physical Partitioning

Approach

The hypervisor assigns separate physical

resources to each guest OS, such as disk
partitions, disk drives, and network
interface cards.

Security &
Performance

Having physical separation for resources

may provide stronger security and
improved performance than logical
partitioning.

Logical Partitioning
This may divide resources on a single host or
across multiple hosts as in a pool of resources
with the same security impact level
categorization, allowing multiple guest OSs to
share the same physical resources, such as
processors and RAM, with the hypervisor
mediating access to the resources.
Having logical separation for resources may
not provide stronger security and improved
performance than physical partitioning.

Physical partitioning sets hard limits on resources for each guest OS because unused capacity from one resource
may not be accessed by any other guest OS.
Many virtualization systems can do both physical and logical partitioning. Some organizations have policies about
which application data can physically reside on drives with the data of other applications, and such policies should take
into account physical and logical partitioning in hypervisors.
Having separate partitions for resource is an important part of isolating guest OSs. Isolation also involves limiting
guest OS communications and the access that each guest OS has to the other guest OSs, to the hypervisor, and to the host
OS (if present).

Impact Factor (JCC): 6.8785

Index Coper nicus Value (ICV): 3.0

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Security Concern for Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Hypervisors can theoretically support a level of logical isolation nearly equivalent to physical isolation, mediating
all communications from each guest OS to have full control over each guest OSs actions.
Hypervisors can permit interactions between guest OSs as needed, such as allowing two desktop OSs to share a
file system.
Sandboxing
Hypervisors can also dynamically alter isolation for each guest OS as needede.g., enabling and disabling
networking at specific times. Isolation has obvious security benefits, but it can also increase the reliability of a host by
preventing actions in one guest OS from directly affecting another. E.g., if one guest OS crashes because of an application
fault or an attack, the other guest OSs on that host are unlikely to be affected. Isolating each guest OS from the others and
restricting what resources they can access and what privileges they have is also known as sandboxing.
Another motivation for isolating guest OSs from each other and the underlying hypervisor and host OS is the
mitigation of side-channel attacks. These attacks exploit the physical properties of hardware to reveal information about
usage patterns for memory access, CPU use, and other resources.
Escape
Attackers may attempt to break out of a guest OS so that they can access the hypervisor, other guest OSs, or the
underlying host OS. Breaking out of a guest OS is also known as escape. If an attacker can successfully escape a guest OS
and gain access to the hypervisor, the attacker might be able to compromise the hypervisor and gain control over all of its
guest OSs. So the hypervisor provides a single point of security failure for all the guest OSs; a single breach of the
hypervisor places all the guest OSs at high risk.
Guest OSs are often not completely isolated from each other and from the host OS because that would prevent
necessary functionality. E.g., many hosted virtualization solutions provide mechanisms called guest tools through which a
guest OS can access files, directories, the copy/paste buffer, and other resources on the host OS or another guest OS.
These communication mechanisms can inadvertently serve as an attack vector, such as transmitting malware or permitting
an attacker to gain access to particular resources. Bare metal virtualization software does not offer such sharing
capabilities.
B. Guest OS Monitoring
The hypervisor is fully aware of the current state of each guest OS it controls. As such, the hypervisor may have
the ability to monitor each guest OS as it is running, which is known as introspection.
Introspection can provide full auditing capabilities that may otherwise be unavailable. Monitoring capabilities
provided through introspection can include network traffic, memory, processes, and other elements of a guest OS.
For many virtualization products, the hypervisor can incorporate additional security controls or interface with
external security controls and provide information to them that was gathered through introspection. E.g., firewalling,
intrusion detection, and access control.
Many products also allow the security policy being enforced through hypervisor-based security controls to be
moved as a guest OS is migrated from one physical host to another.

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Network traffic monitoring is particularly important when networking is being performed between two guest OSs
on the host or between a guest OS and the host OS. Under typical network configurations, this traffic does not pass through
network-based security controls, so host-based security controls should be used to monitor the traffic instead.
C. Image and Snapshot Management
One of the biggest security issues with images and snapshots is that they contain sensitive data such as passwords,
personal data, and so on just like a physical hard drive. It is more significant to think about security of the data in that
image or snapshot because it is easier to move around an image or snapshot than a hard drive. Snapshots can be more
unsafe than images because snapshots contain the contents of RAM memory at the time that snapshot was taken, and this
might include sensitive information that was not even stored on the drive itself.
An operating system and applications can be installed, configured, secured, and tested in a single image and that
image then distributed to many hosts which save substantial time, giving added time for the contents of the image to be
secured more efficiently, and also look up the consistency and strength of security across hosts. Images needs to be
cautiously protected against unauthorized access, modification, and replacement as images can be distributed and stored
easily.
Sprawl: Another potential problem with the increasing the usage of virtualization is the proliferation of images
which is known as sprawl.
It is easy to create new image within just a few minutes without any concern of security. So needless images may
be created and run. Organizations should think on implementing formal image management processes that oversee image
creation, security, distribution, storage, use, retirement, and destruction, for server virtualization.
Same thought should be given to snapshot management. In some cases, organizations policies do not allow
storage of snapshots because of the risk of malware from infected systems being stored in snapshots and later reloaded.
Image management can provide significant security and operational advantages to an organization. E.g., if the
image contents become negotiated or damaged, that image can instantly be replaced with a known good image. Snapshots
can serve as backups, permitting the rapid recovery of information added to the guest OS since the real image was set up.
One of the disadvantages related to this type of backup is that incremental or differential backups of the system
may not be possible. It is possible only if the hypervisor supports it. Once the snapshot is captured and after that if a change
is made to the guest OS, the original snapshot will not include this change, and a new snapshot will need to be applied.
As a consequence of this, snapshot management needs to be considered as part of image management.
For virtualization which involves multiple physical servers, guest OS migration supports load balancing by
allowing dynamic control over which host each virtualized server is running on at any given time.
E. g., if a specific host is being heavily utilized, nearly to the point of resource breakdown, one or more of its
guest OSs could be transferred to hosts with lower utilization. This avoids denial of service conditions and thus improves
the performance of the guest OSs.
This guest OS migration has a potential disadvantage suppose a guest OS contains malicious code which is not
detected, the guest OS could be migrated to another host and could compromise that host. And the same trouble happens
while converting a comprised physical system to a virtual machine.
Impact Factor (JCC): 6.8785

Index Coper nicus Value (ICV): 3.0

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Security Concern for Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Organizations can preserve known-good copies of each guest OS at one place, allowing testers to take advantage
of a fresh copy of the guest OS for each test that re-establishes the system to the desired baseline. This allows testers to
ensure that the test environments configuration goes with that of production environment and that the effects of
performing one test do not involuntarily influence the results of a subsequent test. Even through virtualization, testers can
have access to multiple configurations and platforms to test applications, software updates in a safe and restricted
environment. If guest OS is properly configured then any configuration available on a production system can be replicated.
In some conditions, testing can be performed on an exact copy of the production guest OS.
In all these cases, images can be used to good effect. Images that hold an entire guest OS can be replicated for
each fresh copy and many organizations keep their images on shared storage so that their departments can have access to
them easily.

CONCLUSIONS
Majority of the security issues presented here concerns the security of the host, guest operating system and the
hypervisor. If the host or the hypervisor is compromised then the whole security model is broken. Attacks against the
hypervisor are becoming more popular among the attackers realm. Therefore after setting up the environment, care should
be taken to ensure that the hypervisor is secure enough to the newly emerging threats, if not patches has to be done.
Patches should be done frequently so that the risk of hypervisor being compromised will be avoided.
Virtualization is a powerful solution to reduce the operational costs in todays computing but if done wrong it
become as a threat to the environment. While implementing, exaggerate the security model to with stand the attacks.
And as mentioned earlier keep monitoring for new developments that emerges in this field and continue to stay up to date.
[12]

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Impact Factor (JCC): 6.8785

Index Coper nicus Value (ICV): 3.0