Security in live Virtual Machine migration

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Issue Date
2011-12
Embargo End Date
Authors
Shah, Payal Hemchand
Advisor
Pendse, Ravi
Citation
Abstract

Virtualization has become an essential technology for organizations. With on-demand services from vendors, a substantial rise in the use of virtualization has been noticed. Today there are various kinds of virtualization techniques offering different advantages. One of the important features of virtualization is live virtual machine (VM) migration. In live VM migration, the controls of a VM are migrated from one physical host to another. Workload balancing, and server maintenance becomes easy by migrating the VM. The ability to reboot or shut down the physical server without affecting running applications is greatly beneficial to an organization. With this indispensable feature of live VM migration, the security factor is still unanswered. Very little research has been done in exploring the security concerns inherent while data moves between the two physical machines. This thesis looks at this poorly explored area and attempts to propose a proper solution, and thereby maintain security. Man–in–the–middle attack could be created by sniffing data between the hypervisors and confidentiality is lost. Data in transit could be read and then tampered with or misused, and can create havoc in the network and bring it down completely. The research shows how a malicious attacker can sniff the data while performing live VM migration over Xen hypervisor and exploit information. Using this experiment the author proposes strategies that can be used to have a secure live migration process.

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Description
Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
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