Evaluation of Hypervisor Stability towards Insider Attacks

Virtualization technology plays a key role in cloud computing. Thus, the security issues of virtualization tools (hypervisors, emulators, etc.) should be under precise consideration. However, threats of insider attacks are underestimated. The virtualization tools and hypervisors have been poorly protected from this type of attacks. Furthermore, hypervisor is one of the most critical elements in cloud computing infrastructure. Firstly, hypervisor vulnerabilities analysis is provided. Secondly, a formal model of insider attack on hypervisor is developed. Consequently, on the basis of the formal attack model, we propose a new methodology of hypervisor stability evaluation. In this paper, certain security countermeasures are considered that should be integrated in hypervisor software architecture.