Secure assignment strategy of virtual machines based on operating system diversity

The co-resident attack across virtual machines is a serious security challenge to the resource sharing mechanism in cloud computing. The existing defensive solutions, mainly aiming at improving the isolation and dynamics of virtual machines, require modification of the monitor or frequent migration of virtual machines, which are hard to be deployed in large scale scenarios. Considering the strong dependence of co-resident attacks on the type of operating system, a diversified assignment strategy of operating systems for virtual machines is proposed to mitigate the attack by increasing the cost of attackers. Specifically, a diversified operating system mapping model is proposed, and an interactive workflow process is established between the user and the cloud service provider. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the attack efficiency by at least 33.46%, which provides more security guarantee for the cloud environment when compared with the assignment strategy of single operating system.