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Characterizing hypervisor vulnerabilities in cloud computing servers

Published: 08 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The rise of the Cloud Computing paradigm has led to security concerns, taking into account that resources are shared and mediated by a Hypervisor which may be targeted by rogue guest VMs and remote attackers. In order to better define the threats to which a cloud server's Hypervisor is exposed, we conducted a thorough analysis of the codebase of two popular open-source Hypervisors, Xen and KVM, followed by an extensive study of the vulnerability reports associated with them. Based on our findings, we propose a characterization of Hypervisor Vulnerabilities comprised of three dimensions: the trigger source (i.e. where the attacker is located), the attack vector (i.e. the Hypervisor functionality that enables the security breach), and the attack target (i.e. the runtime domain that is compromised). This can be used to understand potential paths different attacks can take, and which vulnerabilities enable them. Moreover, most common paths can be discovered to learn where the defenses should be focused, or conversely, least common paths can be used to find yet-unexplored ways attackers may use to get into the system.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Cloud Computing '13: Proceedings of the 2013 international workshop on Security in cloud computing
May 2013
78 pages
ISBN:9781450320672
DOI:10.1145/2484402
  • General Chair:
  • Xingming Sun,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Elaine Shi,
  • Kui Ren
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 May 2013

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Author Tags

  1. attack vectors
  2. hypervisor vulnerabilities
  3. secure cloud computing
  4. virtualization
  5. vulnerability categorization

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ASIA CCS '13
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Cloud Computing '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 18 submissions, 50%

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  • (2024)Revealing Concepts of a Cloud Deployment ModelEmerging Trends in Cloud Computing Analytics, Scalability, and Service Models10.4018/979-8-3693-0900-1.ch017(331-339)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Investigation on storage level data integrity strategies in cloud computing: classification, security obstructions, challenges and vulnerabilityJournal of Cloud Computing10.1186/s13677-024-00605-z13:1Online publication date: 15-Feb-2024
  • (2024)The Design and Optimization of Memory Ballooning in SEV Confidential Virtual Machines2024 IEEE International Conference on Joint Cloud Computing (JCC)10.1109/JCC62314.2024.00009(9-16)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
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