Protection through isolation: Virtues and pitfalls

Multitenancy is a key feature of cloud computing which has become a major concept recently. Nevertheless, sharing resources among a number of customers who are unknown to each other implies certain risks. While isolation is a strong means of mitigation, it also challenges a number of the main principles of cloud computing. Cloud computing looks to maximize resource use and isolation comes always at a cost, leaving few resources for the actual desired computation. In this chapter, we discuss the topic of hypervisor isolation by the example of networking. This includes the discussion of hypervisor architectures and mechanisms of isolation considering networking. Identifying the attack surface, an inventory of network-based attacks exploiting hypervisor isolation and possible countermeasures are presented.

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