VSpec: workload-adaptive operating system specialization for virtual machines in cloud computing

The security of cloud services and underlying resources is a major concern due to vulnerabilities existing in current implementation of the virtualization. Thus, there is a need of detecting system-level attacks like viruses, worms, malware, etc. In this paper, we extend our previous work on vulnerability assessment and patching by integrating in-VM-assisted agent-based malware detection (AMD) framework for securing high-risk virtual machines (VMs) in cloud. The proposed framework has two components, viz. agent at VM and anomaly detection at hypervisor. An agent continuously looks for the new deployment of the executable in-VM and applies the signature-based detection to detect known malware. For detecting unknown attacks, it generates the profile with optimal static features for new executable. The optimal features are derived using an extended binary bat algorithm with two new fitness functions. The profile is transferred to hypervisor where anomaly detection using random forest classifier is applied. It classifies the executable to either normal or malware and generates an alert to VM user. The functionality of the proposed AMD framework is validated over cloud testbed at NIT Goa, as well as with the latest malware datasets. In addition, we analyze the VM security requirements fulfilled by the proposed framework.

Service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between cloud computing customer and provider. Improving the customers' trust with cloud computing requires monitoring and ensuring the quality of the provided services continuously. Therefore, this paper provides a model for monitoring the SLA which belongs to the same customer and a specific provider of multiple virtual machines (VMs) in the same environment. The core foundations for this model are: SLA, quality of service (QoS) parameters, multiple VMs and violations' penalty assessment. The proposed model monitors the QoS parameters within multiple VMs environment dynamically and checks for any violation. Moreover; the penalty for each violation will be calculated and informed to the customer and provider at the same time. The proposed model depends on the time factor while running the VMs in sequentially manner with a short period of time as a gap between each VM. This model prevents any interception between VMs and can maintain synchronisation.

This paper presents ALARM, an autonomic load-aware resource management algorithm that can be used to manage physical machines or virtual machines in cloud, which participate in a P2P key-value store. A lot of existing key-value stores claim that they are elastic enough to scale up or down with no downtime or interruption to applications. However, the question that when the scaling up or down should take place has still not been resolved. The situation may get worse if the data store consists of hundreds of machines, for it's unrealistic for a system administrator to monitor the system and add/remove a machine manually. Fortunately, cloud computing and virtualization technology have enabled the real-time provision of virtual machines and a way of managing virtual machines without human interference. By supervising the utilization of multiple resources (CPU, memory, network IO, etc.) in virtual machines hosting the data store, our ALARM algorithm will take effect when some of the machines become overloaded or under loaded. The experiment result shows that ALARM helps the Open Chord data store, an open-source implementation of the Chord protocol, scale up and down according to the resource usage in the virtual machines.

In this paper, a research work is carried out to improve workload management by minimize energy consumption of node, localizing traffic in a network and reduce communication delay between virtual machines in cloud environment. Cloud computing consists numerous virtual machine to store huge volume of data. The usage of virtual machines is to provide separate guest operating system which is popular now-a-days. The workload management across different virtual machines in cloud is really a difficult process. Decentralized approaches were proposed in the literature for energy efficient management of virtual machines. But still it has some issues like failed to consider the communication between virtual machines and it leads to traffic in a network. Thus it reduces the performance of work load management.

In Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, there exist many virtual machines (VMs) that are not used for a long time. For such VMs, many vulnerabilities are often found in installed software while VMs are suspended. If security updates are applied to such VMs after the VMs are resumed, the VMs easily suffer from attacks via the Internet. To solve this problem, offline update of VMs has been proposed, but some approaches have to permit cloud administrators to resume users' VMs. The others are applicable only to completely stopped VMs and often corrupt virtual disks if they are applied to suspended VMs. In addition, it is sometimes difficult to accurately emulate security updates offline. In this paper, we propose OUassister, which enables consistent offline update of suspended VMs. OUassister emulates security updates of VMs offline in a non-intrusive manner and applies the emulation results to the VMs online. This separation prevents virtual disks of even suspended VMs from being corrupted. For more accurate emulation of security updates, OUassister provides an emulation environment using a technique called VM introspection. Using this environment, it automatically extracts updated files and executed scripts. We have implemented OUassister in Xen and confirmed that the time for critical online update was largely reduced.

The rapid development of cloud computing expands the scale of modern cloud data centers, resulting in growing challenges of energy consumption. Load balancing of virtual machines(VMs), for the purposes of improving the utilization of physical resources and reducing energy consumption, has become a research focus in recent years. However, the existing researches mostly focus on how to maximize resource utilization and reduce energy consumption. Security issues in the context of load balancing of VMs were rarely addressed. In this paper, we research the key procedures of load balancing, VM selection and VM placement, we find that the existing schemes introduced several security problems. In consideration of some conclusions of recent researches and inevitable live migrations during load balancing, common tenants have sufficient reasons to worry about their VMs' security when they are migrated to strange hosts and/or co-reside with the VMs owned by strange tenants. In short, VMs' mobility introduced by load balance expands the attack surface. In this work, we classify and analyze related security threats and create an information leakage model for load balancing. We present a new security policy, SeLance, to secure the load balancing via avoiding above threats as far as possible. We develop exact implementations in CloudSim and OpenStack. We show that SeLance can effectively alleviate the threats introduced by load balancing, the security score can improve 46.90%-81.15%, while keeping the load balancer's original function to a great extent (± 2.5%).

WITHDRAWN: Experimental performance analysis of load balancing of tasks using honey bee inspired algorithm for resource allocation in cloud environment

Cloud computing provides us various services over the Internet and services have various problems includes security issues, energy efficiency, big data problem, load balancing etc. Proper Load balancing is used to accomplish proper resource utilization, optimal throughput achievement, reduce response time. Various research papers focused on various technique used to optimize response time, effectively lessens the system load, low computation and other overhead. Resources scheduling in virtual machine in cloud computing environment have also scheduling strategy constructed on genetic algorithm to reduce or avoids dynamic migration. The review paper specially focused on comparison of two algorithms PSO and SJF-MMBF on parameters like total flow time, completion time variance, RPD makespan, RPD total flow time etc.

Cloud computing(CC) delivers multiple services to users by processing complex tasks through internet connections to serve as a dynamic, dependable, and flexible computing solution. With the increased Internet speed, the user demands to perform many tasks through computing provided by cloud virtual machines (VMs) created in heterogeneous servers. The complexity of cloud computing(CC) increases through the diversity of servers and the increased demand for resources to perform more tasks, which makes the cloud data center(CDC) unbalanced in load. Therefore, future cloud systems will require more effective resource management(RM) methods to balance load and improve Quality of Service (QoS). This paper proposes KMPPVM-DRM, a dynamic clustering and scheduling approach for VM resource allocation(RA) based on the KMeans++ algorithm. VMs are clustered into three groups (high, medium, low) according to their real-time normalized CPU and RAM weights, using weighting parameters α = 0.6 and β = 0.4. Tasks are categorized into three levels based on length and mapped to appropriate VM clusters. Within each cluster, a Utilization-Level Comparator (ULC) dynamically selects the optimal VM for task execution. The experimental results were conducted using CloudSim, with 5 and 10 VMs and task counts ranging from 1000 to 10000. The proposed model was compared with PSO, ACO, and DBSCAN algorithms using execution time, average start time, and average finish time. Results show that with 10 VMs, the proposed model achieved a harmonic mean execution time of 886.72 ms, compared to 4102.99 ms (PSO), 4672.25 ms (ACO), and 3071.51 ms (DBSCAN). It also attained the lowest harmonic mean start and finish times of 166.41 ms and 167.19 ms, respectively. Relative reduction in execution time against DBSCAN ranged from 69.90% to 71.52%, with start and finish time improvements between 52.65% and 81.51%.To ensure statistical reliability, a paired t-test confirmed that the performance improvements were statistically significant (p < 0.05) across all task sizes. The findings confirm that KMPPVM-DRM enhances resource allocation(RA) efficiency and scheduling effectiveness, maintaining balanced loads even with limited resources (e.g., only 5 VMs) and outperforming PSO, ACO, and DBSCAN in all tested scenarios.

Virtual Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds are emerging for secondary cloud service providers to manage their own IaaS clouds on top of existing IaaS clouds. In virtual IaaS clouds, guest virtual machines (VMs) run inside cloud VMs provided by existing IaaS clouds. Unlike traditional IaaS clouds, they can be migrated between cloud VMs co-located at the same host. However, the performance of such VM migration is low due to slow virtual networks and doubled system loads. To optimize VM migration between co-located cloud VMs, we propose zero-copy migration for virtual IaaS clouds. Zero-copy migration just relocates the memory image of a guest VM without any copy. To enable live migration with negligible downtime, it first makes the memory of a guest VM share with the destination cloud VM and thereafter completes memory relocation. We have implemented a system called VMBeam for enabling zero-copy migration in Xen. According to our experimental results, zero-copy migration could achieve high migration performance and low system loads.

In this research, an Individual Learner Big Data Based Cloud Role Player Game Learning Corresponding to Individual Learner Big Data is proposed. Based on the proposed platform, all the learning states and information (Big Data) of individual learner can be further analyzed. By using dynamic assigni ng algorithm, individual learner (student) can be separated into different levels related to the learning ability. According to dynamic assigning algorithm, student's answering times and answering correct rate of each education scenario in the proposed cloud based digital game learning system is considered. Then, suitable teaching scenario will be provided for individual user corresponding to personal learning ability. Each designed modular teaching scenario can be embedded into the game platform on the virtual machine in cloud. The information about students in the game learning system can be stored in the cloud database. In addition, the whole learning system is established as a virtual machine. System maintainer can configure the learning system easily and quickly. Based on cloud, different remote devices can connect to server for learning.

Performance analysis of virtual machines is an indispensable capability for achieving on-demand resource provisioning in cloud computing systems. In this paper, a nonparametric multivariate method is presented as a solution to forecast performance degradation of virtual machines in cloud computing systems. Firstly, the k-means algorithm is adopted to partition multivariate training data into three clusters, which correspond to the virtual machine states of normal, anomaly and failure. Based on this clustering, the performance data of working virtual machines are classified. For those classified as anomalies, a nonparametric CUSUM algorithm is carried out to analyze whether they will lead to serious performance degradation (corresponding to the failure state). Experiment results based on Hadoop show this method can not only identify the normal and failure states of virtual machines, but also succeed in forecasting performance degradation of virtual machines by those anomalous data.

In this paper, we propose a Cloud Based Dynamical Digital Game Learning Scenario Corresponding to Individual Learner Big Data according to the proposed dynamic assigning algorithm to separate individual learner into different levels. In dynamic assigning algorithm, student's answering times and answering correct rate for each education scenario in cloud based digital game learning system is considered. Suitable teaching scenario will be provided for individual user corresponding to personal learning ability. Each designed modular teaching materials can be embedded into the game platform on the virtual machine in cloud. The information about users in the individual game learning system can be stored in the cloud database. In addition, the whole learning system is established as a virtual machine. System maintainer can configure the learning system easily and quickly. Based on cloud, different remote devices can connect to server for learning.

With the tremendous growth in migration to cloud computing for traditional applications, the demand for virtualization is the new need for further research and enhancements. The high demand for virtualization in cloud computing is been addressed with the technology enhancement and in terms of virtual machines. Majorly the hardware component management of virtual machine is considerably reaching the pick of research with the recent advancements by multiple companies and open source researches like AlphaVM, Hyper-V, Integrity Virtual Machines, JPC (Virtual Machine), PowerVM, Sun xVM, VMware Workstation and z LPARs. Another most important component of virtualization and virtual machine image storage is been the bottleneck for the further advancement. The limitations are been addressed by clustering and storage area networking, however these existing solutions are no match for the industrial grade demand for the VM image storage requirements.Hence in this work we propose a cloud based virtual machine storage framework designed for large scale deployment satisfying the other needs for storage features like replication and measurements of performance improvements. This work also demonstrates the advancements in performance for virtualization management

With the rapid development of virtualization technology, virtual machine (VM) is widely used by cloud computing - the more and more popular computing paradigm. Thus, in order to guarantee the security of cloud computing, it is necessary to securely identify the kernel of VM, the software stack running on VM and the hardware platform which VM relies on. This paper designs a system of trusted connection based on virtual machine architecture and implements a system prototype. Our system not only can securely measure and identify the kernel of VM, the software stack running on VM and the hardware platform which VM relies on, but also can realize isolations to untrusted VMs. There are three main parts in our system: trusted chain, attestation and isolation. The experiments described in this paper prove that our system ensures trusted connection of VMs and achieves isolations to untrusted VMs. The performance of our system is also analyzed and evaluated. According to the analysis results, our system is practical in terms of performance.