cMonitor: VMI-based fine-grained monitoring mechanism in cloud

For the lack of detailed semantic in prior works, a transparent fine-grained monitoring technique (cMonitor) is proposed. Deployed outside the virtual machines, the cMonitor utilizes the elevated privileges of the virtual machine monitor to monitor the network connection, the processes and the relationship between them in protected systems by reconstructing fine-grained system semantics. These semantics contain process states and corresponding network connection. Experimental results show that cMonitor not only can be rapidly deployed in realistic cloud, but also can effectively and universally obtain these fine-grained semantics to assist detection of some advanced network attack. Meanwhile, the network performance overhead is about 3%, which is acceptable.