Sibling virtual machine co-location confirmation and avoidance tactics for Public Infrastructure Clouds

Infrastructure Clouds offer large scale resources for rent, which are typically shared with other users—unless you are willing to pay a premium for single tenancy (if available). There is no guarantee that your instances will run on separate hosts, and this can cause a range of issues when your instances are co-locating on the same host including: mutual performance degradation, exposure to underlying host failures, and increased threat surface area for host compromise. Determining when your instances are co-located is useful then, as a user can implement policies for host separation. Co-location methods to date have typically focused on identifying co-location with another user’s instance, as this is a prerequisite for targeted attacks on the Cloud. However, as providers update their environments these methods either no longer work, or have yet to be proven on the Public Cloud. Further, they are not suitable to the task of simply and quickly detecting co-location amongst a large number of instances. We propose a method suitable for Xen based Clouds which addresses this problem and demonstrate it on EC2—the largest Public Cloud Infrastructure.