An Analysis of the Virtual Machine Migration Incurred Security Problems in the Cloud

Cloud centric computing is a significant trend in computing. It is very appealing because it can offer a number of benefits such as cost efficiency, elasticity, scalability, and convenience to millions of organizations and end users. On the other hand, cloud computing creates many new security problems that should be properly addressed for its wide and successful adoption. In this paper, we analyze a new category of virtual machine (VM) migration incurred security problems. The migration of VM instances in the cloud is highly desirable and even inevitable for reasons such as load balancing and energy saving. We pinpoint that the migration of VM instances from one physical machine to another can weaken or even nullify the security protections provided by the intrusion prevention systems and intrusion detection systems to the original VM instances. We further analyze the root cause of this category of VM migration incurred security problems and discuss the potential approaches for addressing them.

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