Security Challenges of Virtualization in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is the latest technology used by different category of users. Cloud computing services such as Software as service, Platform as service and Infrastructure as service are offered to the users using virtualization technology. Virtualization enables sharing resources of one system such as CPU, Memory and Storage to many users as per the requirement. Mainly Infrastructure as service is offered to the users through the virtual machines. Although there are advantages of using the virtual machines, security is one of the aspect which is taken care to a lesser extent. Virtual machines are exposed to different attacks such as malwares, malicious users. There are threats like denial of service, cross virtual machine attacks, insecure virtual machine migration, attacks on virtual machine image and hypervisor etc., hence virtual machine security has to be looked with high priority. Mitigation of the risks at virtualization level are surveyed.In this paper, several security vulnerabilities are identified and present various algorithms and implemented approaches to provide security to virtualization layer.