Attack Resistant Distributed Scheduling and Virtual Machine Management Framework for Clouds

Abstract

Cloud computing environment supports high scalable hardware and software resource sharing platform through the Internet. The cloud provider shares the hardware resources with the cloud customers through the Virtual Machines (VM). Virtual Machines (VM) running on the same physical server are denoted as Co-resident VMs. The Co-resident Virtual Machines are logically isolated from each other. The logical isolation is violated by the side channels of the malicious users. The sensitive information from the Coresident Vms are accessed by the malicious users is defined as Co-resident attacks. The Cryptographic keys, workloads and web traffic rates are the sensitive information accessed by the malicious users. The Co-resident attack is also referred as co-location, co-residence or co-residency attacks. The Virtual Machine allocation policy is used to place the Virtual Machines in the physical server. The malicious user co-locates their VM to the target VM. The security, workload balance and power consumption parameters are considered in the Virtual Machine placement process. Secure metrics are defined to measure the safety of the VM allocation policy. The Balanced VM Allocation Policy is build to assign VMs in the physical servers. The Previous Selected Server First (PSSF) policy is used with security metrics. Least VM allocation policy, Most VM allocation policy and Random allocation policy are used with the workload balance parameter. The data centers are connected to the Virtual Machines with in the same environment. The attack resistant Virtual Machine Management framework is build with centralized and distributed scheduling schemes. The live VM migration is protected from the side channel attacks. The system is enhanced with multiple data center management mechanism. The Distributed VM Placement (DVMP) policy is build to allocate the virtual machines on the physical server.