Virtualization has become ubiquitous in modern computing infrastructure, but security challenges remain inadequately addressed. This work is significant in systematically surveying security issues across multiple virtualization layers and providing practical guidance on threat mitigation for enterprise systems.
This paper surveys virtualization technologies and security vulnerabilities in virtual machine environments, focusing on data center and web services infrastructure. The work provides comprehensive coverage of current virtualization approaches including full virtualization, paravirtualization, and application virtualization, along with associated security challenges.
The survey identifies and categorizes security threats across virtualization layers including VM isolation, resource management, migration issues, and communication vulnerabilities. It provides recommendations for improving virtual machine security through access control policies, trusted platform modules, and careful configuration management.
@inproceedings{Chen2012,
author = {Qian Chen} and {Mehrotra}, R. and Dubey, Abhishek and {Abdelwahed}, S. and {Rowland}, K.},
booktitle = {2012 Proceedings of IEEE Southeastcon},
title = {On state of the art in virtual machine security},
year = {2012},
month = {mar},
pages = {1-6},
abstract = {Data centers and computing service providers are striving to improve the utilization of their computing resources. This is primarily due to the need of resources to be more economical and power efficient. Virtualization is one of the concepts that provide flexibility to host multiple operating system stacks on a single hardware. By effectively partitioning the computing resources, it reduces the total number of physical servers and consolidates several services on a single physical rack. Each virtual machine behaves like an independent machine (may be duplicate of the original one) while the scheduling of hardware resources among different virtual machines is performed with the help of a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). Proliferation of virtual machines in the enterprise architecture creates need for identification of potential security risks as well as appropriate solutions for the identified risks to ensure the integrity of the underlying applications hosted at the virtual machines. This paper describes available virtualization technologies, corresponding security vulnerabilities, and available solutions.},
category = {conference},
contribution = {minor},
doi = {10.1109/SECon.2012.6196905},
file = {:Chen2012-On_state_of_the_art_in_virtual_machine_security.pdf:PDF},
issn = {1091-0050},
keywords = {virtualization, security, virtual machines, data centers, web services, threat analysis, VMware, Xen},
month_numeric = {3}
}