Research on security algorithm of virtual machine live migration for KVM virtualization system

Abstract

Live migration of virtual machine is the process of moving VMs from one physical server to another server keeping services running in VMs, and facilitates load balancing, energy saving, hardware dependent, remote migration and so on. This novel technology brings a huge convenience, and also presents new security challenges that the security concern is the major factor effecting this technology widely adopted in IT industry. Live migration exposes VM’s data as plaintext to the network as a result of vulnerabilities in the migration protocol. The traditional protection way is using the SSL protocol, but that consume too much time and not as safe as it used to be, few users adopt this way. So we design a security algorithm based original migration algorithm making up for the lack of security. In this paper, firstly, we analyze and verify security threats to live migration. Secondly, through the analysis on the live migration mechanism, the bottom driver, and the source code of KVM virtualization system, we design a security algorithm for live migration to meet the security needs of different users. Thirdly, the new security algorithm which we innovatively add three functions to the original algorithm to ensure migration data to remain confidential and unmodified during the transmission. The security algorithm make up the security vulnerabilities of original migration mechanism and take less time than the SSL. Finally, a series of experiments validate the algorithm that could solve the balance of the security and performance in live migration process.