A secure VM Live migration technique in a cloud computing environment using blowfish and blockchain technology

Abstract

Data centers have proven to be the infrastructure's backbone to deliver cloud services. With the emerging paradigm of cloud computing, VM live migration is the process of migrating a running virtual machine across specific hosts with no client-visible interruption. Security, vulnerability, resource optimization, and maintaining the quality of service are many issues in live VM migration. Maintaining security in VM live migration is one of the important concerns. For creating a secure environment, this paper proposes a secure live migration technique by applying one of the cryptographic algorithms that are blowfish for generating an encryption-decryption-based system, and blockchain technology which provides a solution to address many challenges like decentralization, data privacy, and VM security to prevent from side-channel attack, and a man in the middle attacks. The algorithms namely Key Management Blowfish Encryption (KMBE), Access Control Searchable Encryption (ACSE), Protected Searchable Destination Server (PSDS), and Key Expansion Blowfish Decryption (KEBD) improve security in VM live migration in terms of various parameters like data center request servicing time, response time and data transfer cost. The proposed technique KMBE improves migration cost ($) by 60–70%, ACSE reduces overall energy consumption by 70–80%, PSDS reduces make span by 40–50% and KEBD improves the security in live VM migration by 30–40%.