Security Vulnerability Assessment of OpenStack Cloud

Migrating the virtual machines from on-premise to cloud raises new security challenges for a company. A potential threat to the tenants are not only the Internet hackers, but also the cloud service provider and the other co-tenants, due to the multi-tenancy feature. The cloud service provider's security is challenged by the tenants, as well. Deploying the open source cloud raises additional challenges since the intruders have access to the cloud source code and can assess its vulnerabilities. In this paper, we thoroughly assess the security vulnerabilities of OpenStack cloud framework, one of the most used open source cloud frameworks today. We assess the vulnerabilities of OpenStack server node, virtual machine instances and OpenStack's Dashboard, the web management interface. The security assessment shows that OpenStack cloud has security vulnerabilities that need to be secured by developing the patch.