A Review of Virtualization, Hypervisor and VM Allocation Security: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures

Cloud computing is a very popular information processing concept where infrastructures and solutions are delivered as services. It uses virtualization technologies to maximize resources utilization such as application performance, etc. These technologies make cloud computing desirable but they also introduce serious threats to service delivery since they allow multiple operating systems to share the same physical machine. This paper proposes a literature review on security solutions for virtualization, hypervisor and virtual machines (VM) allocation Security. We identify cloud computing vulnerabilities, and propose a new classification of known security threats and vulnerabilities into categories. We present different countermeasures to control the vulnerabilities and reduce the threats. We also identify the limitations of these countermeasures and give research perspectives on cloud security particularly on virtualization and VM allocation security.