Security threats and attacks on virtualization for cloud computing

Abstract

Enterprises continuously seek innovative approaches to reduce operational computing costs while getting the most from their resources. Cloud Comput- ing infrastructures are the latest technological advancement with the potential to maximize resource utilization while reducing costs. The new paradigm of Cloud Computing possesses severe security risks to its adopters due to the distributed nature of Cloud Computing environments which make them a rich target for malicious individuals. Cloud infrastructure commonly relies on virtualization. The virtualization techniques used in Cloud possess numerous security threats and attacks. In order to cope with these risks, appropriate taxonomies and classi cation criteria for attacks on Cloud Computing are required. On the other hand Cloud Consumers runs numerous applications/scripts in order to complete their computing tasks. Most of them are too complex and complicated to trust. Even with access to the source code, it is di cult to reason about the security of these applications. They might harbor malicious code such as computer viruses, worms, bots, Trojan horses and spyware or contain bugs that are exploitable by carefully crafted input. It is essential that instead of just relying on conventional defense techniques, the next generation of system software must be designed from the ground-up to provide stronger isolation of services running on computer systems. To address the above described security threats to Cloud Instances, we propose an architecture for con ned execution environment to test untrusted applications/scripts inside Cloud Instances. Modern day security researchers consider malware sandbox analysis is as one of the promising approaches for exploring malware. But most of the previous proposed solutions have various security vulnerabilities due to the way of they have been implemented and the technologies that have been used in the implementation. The proposed architecture and proof-of-concept implementation address all the discovered drawbacks of previously presented sandbox solutions. We monitor all the sys- tem calls that are executed by the adversary to con ne the adversary and limit the damage an attacker can cause to the Cloud Instance. The research work related to the proposed sandbox architecture has been tested through LangshaJail, which is the proof-of-concept, built for the Cloud vii Instances, using latest open source technologies that includes Linux as the Operating System Environment, Linux Resource Containers (LXC) as the vir- tualization environment and Seccomp as the system call ltering technology. The LangshaJail system was tested for compliance to Cloud Computing secu- rity objectives and adherence to performance criteria in order to validate the design approaches and implementation mechanisms used in the research. Further as a part of the this thesis we present a taxonomy based on the notion of attack surfaces of virtualization for Infrastructure-as-a-Service-based Cloud o erings, thus making them more concrete and improving their analysis. The presented taxonomy specially addresses attacks based on residues of Cloud Instances. These residue based attacks are new venues for attackers that have previously not been addressed.