Establishing Trust in Multi-Virtual Machine-Environments: VM Status Legitimization for Industry 4.0

Virtualization is a key enabler of flexible and scalable production environments in Industry 4.0. However, ensuring the legitimacy and integrity of virtual machines (VMs) in industrial multi-VM systems presents significant challenges, particularly in network-isolated environments with strict security and availability requirements. This paper explores various security mechanisms for VM legitimization, including hardwarebased trust anchors, system fingerprinting, and hypervisor-based monitoring. We propose a novel approach leveraging memorybased experimental fingerprinting to detect unauthorized VM clones by analyzing storage access latencies. Experimental results demonstrate that subtle variations in I/O performance can serve as reliable indicators of cloned or tampered VMs. Our findings contribute to improving the security and trustworthiness of virtualized industrial control systems without reliance on external validation services.