Developing security profile for virtual machines to ensure secured consolidation : conceptual model

Cloud computing is a heterogeneous architecture, benefiting from a range of technologies provisioning several IT services. Ensuring effective and adequate security measures in Cloud environment remains a challenge and dominant concern to the Cloud consumers. In order to save energy and operating cost, Cloud providers consolidate virtual machines to minimum number of physical machines. Lack of security policy during virtual machine consolidation increases security risk to the client. Therefore, we propose a conceptual model to develop security profiles for virtual machines by designing a fuzzy logic based mechanism to amalgamate all the threat parameters namely inner vulnerability, intrusion behaviour analysis and trusted membership for each of the virtual machine. Essentially, distributive and multi-tenancy nature of Cloud computing paradigm has increased risk and security vulnerabilities like resource monitoring, side channels threat, and denial of service. Considering these security issues, it is necessary to evaluate the vulnerability, intrusion behaviour, and trusted relationship of the virtual machines. Hence, we aim to fill the existing research gap by proposing a design to construct security profiles for virtual machines. These profiles will be considered during virtual machine consolidation. As a future work, we would provide result based on this proposed design which is out of the scope of this paper.