Whispers in the Cloud - A Covert Channel using the Result of Creating a Virtual Machine

With the widespread use of cloud computing, people pay more attention to the security of cloud platforms. For the case of some clouds, users are permitted to use the services, but they cannot communicate with each other in the same cloud. In this paper, we present a new kind of user-level covert channel which we called CCRCVM (Covert Channel using the Result of Creating a Virtual Machine). This covert channel exists in OpenStack, which we have confirmed. This covert channel takes advantage of the result of creating a virtual machine to make the users communicate. First of all, we describe the threat scenario of this covert channel. Then, we describe the theory and communication process of the covert channel. Afterwards, we implement the covert channel in our own OpenStack environment. We also measure the bandwidth and communication accuracy of this covert channel in many times. Finally, we discuss how to mitigate and eliminate this channel.

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