No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The weakness of performance isolation in system virtualization leaks a time window for various kinds of attacks which can be leveraged by malicious users to threaten the security of the virtual machines (VMs) atop or construct hidden information channel. In this paper, we propose vLeaker, a practical covert timing channel built on fine-grained VM I/O performance interference, by which VMs co-resident in storage aspect can exchange the information with relatively high transmission speed and low data error rate. We evaluate our vLeaker system on Xen and VMware hypervisor and show that the maximal transmission rate can arrive at 125 bps on our local testbed. Moreover, the effective transmission rate ranges from 72 to 124 bps with average error rate lower than 13% under different configurations.

No abstract

In virtualized environments, the customers who purchase virtual machines (VMs) from a third-party cloud would expect that their VMs run in an isolated manner. However, the performance of a VM can be negatively affected by co-resident VMs. In this paper, the authors propose vExplorer, a distributed VM I/O performance measurement and analysis framework, where one can use a set of representative I/O operations to identify the I/O scheduling characteristics within a hypervisor, and potentially leverage this knowledge to carry out I/O based performance attacks to slow down the execution of the target VMs. The authors evaluate their prototype on both Xen and VMware platforms with four server benchmarks and show that vExplorer is practical and effective. The authors also conduct similar tests on Amazon’s EC2 platform and successfully slow down the performance of target VMs.

No abstract

No abstract