Secure Live Virtual Machines Migration: Issues and Solutions

In recent years, there has been a huge trend towards running network intensive applications, such as Internet servers and Cloud-based service in virtual environment, where multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on the same machine share the machine's physical and network resources. In such environment, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) virtualizes the machine's resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, network and I/O devices to allow multiple operating systems running in different VMs to operate and access the network concurrently. A key feature of virtualization is live migration (LM) that allows transfer of virtual machine from one physical server to another without interrupting the services running in virtual machine. Live migration facilitates workload balancing, fault tolerance, online system maintenance, consolidation of virtual machines etc. However, live migration is still in an early stage of implementation and its security is yet to be evaluated. The security concern of live migration is a major factor for its adoption by the IT industry. Therefore, this paper uses the X.805 security standard to investigate attacks on live virtual machine migration. The analysis highlights the main source of threats and suggests approaches to tackle them. The paper also surveys and compares different proposals in the literature to secure the live migration.