VLOC: An Approach to Verify the Physical Location of a Virtual Machine In Cloud

The geolocation of data stored and being processed in cloud is an important issue for many organisations due to obligations that require sensitive data to reside or be processed in particular countries. In this paper we introduce an approach, named VLOC, to verify the physical location of a virtual machine on which the customer applications and data are stored. VLOC is implemented as a software which is able to estimate the geolocation of itself and notify the corresponding user if the location is unauthorised. VLOC uses a number of arbitrary web-servers as external landmarks for localisation and employs network latency measurement for distance estimation. Due to the fluctuation in the network latency, VLOC employs a machine learning technique in order to adapt itself to various network latency tolerance. Different from most of geolocation estimation approaches, VLOC is installed inside the target host (inside the cloud). VLOC does not require special hardware nor a network of trusted landmarks. The experimental results shows the accuracy of VLOC is higher than other existing approaches.