Secure VM backup and vulnerability removal in infrastructure clouds

The multi-tenant nature of cloud and provision of resources in terms of virtual machines (VM's) establishes an immense need of rethinking about the applicability of earlier backup and recovery methods in virtual machines based infrastructure cloud platforms. In this work, we have proposed a complete backup and recovery framework, VM-SAVER, which provides a flexible and scalable backup and recovery models for virtualized physical servers inside a multi-tenant cloud. VM-SAVER incorporates the basic state saving methods of various hypervisors and proposes various approaches and scenarios where the virtualized servers backup and recovery is ensured. In addition to this, our framework also has a novel feature of vulnerability detection and removal from the running VM's and past backups. This novel framework is flexible, reconfigurable and can work with a range of hypervisors making it suitable for the present day infrastructure clouds.