Emerging Security Challenges of Cloud Virtual Infrastructure

There are security challenges in the cloud, and a secure cloud is impossible unless the virtual environment is secure. Traditional security solutions do not map well to the virtualized environments because of the complex and ever-dynamic nature of the cloud computing. New virtualization-aware security solutions should be provided to ensure the preemptive security to the overall system. These security solutions should have the intelligence to be self-defending and have the ability to provide real-time detection and prevention of known and unknown threats. The authors' research is focusing on developing a new virtualization-aware security solution that can meet the research challenges and have the ability to defend the cloud virtual infrastructure different layers (including VMs, vSwitch and Hypervisor) against zero-day threats.