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Analysing Virtual Machine Security in Cloud Systems

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Intelligent Cloud Computing (ICC 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8993))

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Abstract

The cloud computing concept has significantly influenced how information is delivered and managed in large scale distributed systems today. Cloud computing is currently expected to reduce the economic cost of using computational and data resources, and is therefore particularly appealing to small and medium scale companies (who may not wish to maintain in-house IT departments). To provide economies of scale, providers of Cloud computing infrastructure make significant use of virtualisation techniques – in which processes of various tenants sharing the same physical resources are separated logically using a hypervisor. In spite of its wide adoption in Cloud computing systems, virtualisation technology suffers from many security and privacy issues. We outline security challenges that remain in the use of virtualisation techniques to support multiple customers on the same shared infrastructure. We also illustrate, using an experiment, how data leakage occurs when multiple VMs are executed on the same physical infrastructure, leading to unauthorised access to (previously) deleted data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Amazon Web Services - http://aws.amazon.com.

  2. 2.

    Google App Engine - https://console.developers.google.com/start/appengine.

  3. 3.

    Amazon Cloudtrail - http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail.

  4. 4.

    OpenSSL website defacement - http://tinyurl.com/luugk25.

  5. 5.

    Commvault: VM Sprawl - http://tinyurl.com/nxukpm4.

  6. 6.

    OSFMount tool- http://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Taimur Al Said & Omer F. Rana

Authors
  1. Taimur Al Said
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  2. Omer F. Rana
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Taimur Al Said .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman

    Asma Al-Saidi

  2. GUtech, Muscat, Oman

    Rudolf Fleischer

  3. Zayed University, Dubai, Utd.Arab.Emir.

    Zakaria Maamar

  4. Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom

    Omer F. Rana

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Al Said, T., Rana, O.F. (2015). Analysing Virtual Machine Security in Cloud Systems. In: Al-Saidi, A., Fleischer, R., Maamar, Z., Rana, O. (eds) Intelligent Cloud Computing. ICC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8993. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19848-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19848-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19847-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19848-4

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