An approach for virtual machine image security

Cloud security being the main hindrance in adoption of cloud computing has some most vulnerable security concerns as: virtualization, data and storage. Here, to provide virtualization security, the components of virtualization (such as hypervisors, virtual machines, and virtual machine images) must be secured using some improvised security mechanisms. Amongst all components, Virtual machine images (VM images) are considered to be the fundamental of whole cloud security. Hence must be secured from every possible attack. In this paper, a security protocol is proposed to mainly protect the VM images from two of the possible attacks. One is the channel attack like man-in-the-middle attack (MITM attack) and second is the attack by a malicious executing environment. It is using a concept of symmetric key's component distribution providing an integrity based confidentiality and self-protection. This protection is based on an encapsulated mobile agent. Here one key component is generated and distributed in a secure manner and the other key component is derived by host platform itself using its own available resource configuration information. In order to verify the validity of this approach in overcoming different kind of security attacks, BAN logic based formal representation is presented.