Circular Chain VM Protection in AdjointVM

Abstract

Cloud computing is a demanding subject and its fans are increasing day by day in the private or corporate areas. Confidentiality is the most important point of information security with respect to integrity and availability in cloud computing especially in financial, governmental and military usage. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) service increases the cloud's security level. In this paper, a hybrid approach is introduced that can be used in cloud computing to protect cloud users from the untrusted cloud providers or untrusted employees in a circular chain protection model. This model is proposed over an existing model, AdjointVM, which uses three types of technologies (trusted computing, host-based IDS, virtual machine monitor based IDS) to tackle external and internal threats in cloud systems. The proposed model claims to overcome one of the weakest points of AdjointVM model, and aims to build a more secure cloud environment for the users by adding additional security mechanism between VMs. In the proposed model, responsibility of confidentiality is not giving up only to the providers or cloud administrators, a VM can protect another VM in a circular manner and this results a chain structure and constructs a circular structure to enhance global security of the system. At the same time, users can also manage and monitor their own confidentiality by themselves.