Addressing Issues of Cloud Resilience, Security and Performance through Simple Detection of Co-locating Sibling Virtual Machine Instances

John O'Loughlin, Lee Gillam

2015

Abstract

Most current Infrastructure Clouds are built on shared tenancy architectures, with resources shared amongst large numbers of customers. However, multi tenancy can lead to performance issues (so-called “noisy neighbours”) and also brings potential for serious security breaches such as hypervisor breakouts. Consequently, there has been a focus in the literature on identifying co-locating instances that are being affected by noisy neighbours or suggesting that such instances are vulnerable to attack. However, there is limited evidence of any such attacks in the wild. More beneficially, knowing that there is co-location amongst your own Virtual Machine instances (siblings) can help to avoid being your own worst enemy: avoiding your instances acting as your own noisy neighbours, building resilience through ensuring host-based redundancy, and/or reducing exposure to a single compromised host. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a simple test to detect co-locating sibling instances on Xen-based Clouds, as could help address such needs, and evaluate its efficacy on Amazon’s EC2

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

O'Loughlin J. and Gillam L. (2015). Addressing Issues of Cloud Resilience, Security and Performance through Simple Detection of Co-locating Sibling Virtual Machine Instances . In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-104-5, pages 60-67. DOI: 10.5220/0005485000600067

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer15,
author={John O'Loughlin and Lee Gillam},
title={Addressing Issues of Cloud Resilience, Security and Performance through Simple Detection of Co-locating Sibling Virtual Machine Instances},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2015},
pages={60-67},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005485000600067},
isbn={978-989-758-104-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - Addressing Issues of Cloud Resilience, Security and Performance through Simple Detection of Co-locating Sibling Virtual Machine Instances
SN - 978-989-758-104-5
AU - O'Loughlin J.
AU - Gillam L.
PY - 2015
SP - 60
EP - 67
DO - 10.5220/0005485000600067