International Journal of Information and Computation Technology.
ISSN 0974-2239 Volume 3, Number 6 (2013), pp. 533-538
© International Research Publications House
http://www. irphouse.com /ijict.htm
Hypervisor Security - A Major Concern
1
Nancy Arya,
2
Mukesh Gidwani and
3
Shailendra Kumar Gupta
1
Computer Science, Jagannath University, Jaipur.
2
Computer Science, Jagannath University, Jaipur.
3
Dept. of Physics, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur.
Abstract
In the last few decades, the world of computation moves for the cloud
computing. Cloud computing is a new delivery model for enabling
convenient ,on-demand network access of the computing resources
.The cloud computing is one of today’s most exciting technologies,
because it can reduce the cost and complexity of applications, and it is
flexible and scalable. Virtualization is one of most important element
that makes cloud computing. A key Part of virtualization is the all -
powerful hypervisor which manages the physical platform and can
access all of its resources. Security is the biggest problem in virtual
environment. The security of a virtualization is heavily dependent on
the hypervisor. If the management environment is compromised, all
the virtual machines can be easily copied and modified. Furthermore,
attacks from the management environment easily bypass the security
mechanisms present in guest virtual machines due to the higher
privilege level of the management operating system. Virtual Machine
Monitor also called Hypervisor can be unsecure for the guest virtual
machines. This paper looks at the hypervisor environment security
attacks, possible solutions and precautions against these attacks to
maintain security.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Virtual Machine
Monitor, Hypervisor.
1. Introduction
Cloud computing is model that makes reference to the two essential concepts:
‘abstraction’ and ‘virtualization’ to increase the capacity and capability of IT by