Rui Filipe Pereira, Rui Miguel Silva & João Pedro Orvalho Virtualization and Security Aspects: An Overview Rui Filipe Pereira
[email protected] Lab UbiNET – Computer Science Security and Cybercrime Polytechnic Institute Of Beja Beja, Portugal Rui Miguel Silva
[email protected] Lab UbiNET – Computer Science Security and Cybercrime Polytechnic Institute Of Beja Beja, Portugal João Pedro Orvalho
[email protected] Lab UbiNET – Computer Science Security and Cybercrime Polytechnic Institute Of Beja Beja, Portugal Abstract Virtualization allows a single system to concurrently run multiple isolated virtual machines, operating systems (OSes) or multiple instances of a single OS. It helps organizations to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, improve the use of hardware, and to allocate resources on- demand. Nevertheless, like most technologies, it has vulnerabilities and threats. Research about security issues related to virtualization has been conducted for several years. However, there are still open challenges related to security in virtualization. This paper looks into some of the differences, issues, challenges, and risks caused by virtualization and aims to classify the various virtualization approaches, along with their goals, advantages and drawbacks from a security perspective. Such classification is expected to help in the identification of virtualization technologies that might be applied in a virtualized infrastructure. This work is intended to be an introduction to the security considerations, concerns, and implications arising from use of virtualized systems. Keywords: Virtualization, Cybersecurity, Hypervisor, Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine Monitor. 1. INTRODUCTION Virtualization is a technology that uses a logical environment to overcome the physical limitations of hardware. Due to its characteristics of encapsulation and isolation, virtualization is the basis for cloud computing paradigm.