A framework for security context migration in a firewall secured virtual machine environment

Abstract

Current virtualization technologies enable hosting of a large number of Virtual Machines (VMs) on a common physical host. The hypervisor interconnects these VMs via Virtual Networks (VNs). These VNs underlie the same security requirements as physical networks. Network elements such as stateful firewalls contribute in enforcing this security. With the advent of stateful firewalls on the hypervisor level, a new challenge arises when it comes to VM migration. Not only the VM itself, but also the associated Security Context (SC) has to migrate. Current open-source hypervisors do not address this issue. In this paper we present the architecture and implementation of our framework for migrating SC along with VMs. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.