A Pilot Study on VM Template Authentication

Security is one of the top concerns when moving the IT infrastructure and the business data to the cloud. Three common service models in the cloud are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform As a Service (PaaS), and Software As a Service (SaaS). The focus of this work is to address the security concerns in the IaaS model. Specifically, in the IaaS model, virtual machines are often cloned from the templates to provide rapid deployment for customers. Attacks on the VM template can be catastrophic because the attacks will be replicated numerous times and negatively impact every new virtual machine, which is going to be created. Therefore, how do we prove the authenticity of the VM templates and how do we protect VM templates from being manipulated? If cryptophytic approach is applied, how long will it take to authenticate VM templates? This article studied related work and proposed a cryptography based solution to authenticate VM templates. Real virtual machine templates of different sizes were used to measure the performance of different approaches. The results show that a PKI-like strong authentication approach is not unacceptable to be used in real cloud computing environment. This study is derived from a security course project. Students learned the basics of cryptography and began to apply their knowledge in a real world setting. The study provides insights and benefits for both the cloud consumers and the cloud providers.