Security of OS-level virtualization technologies: Technical report
This addresses security concerns for users of OS-level virtualization in cloud servers and mobile devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems without introducing new methods.
The authors conducted a comparative study of OS-level virtualization systems to assess their security, identifying gaps in current solutions, as there had been no prior systematic security analysis despite the technology's popularity.
The need for flexible, low-overhead virtualization is evident on many fronts ranging from high-density cloud servers to mobile devices. During the past decade OS-level virtualization has emerged as a new, efficient approach for virtualization, with implementations in multiple different Unix-based systems. Despite its popularity, there has been no systematic study of OS-level virtualization from the point of view of security. In this report, we conduct a comparative study of several OS-level virtualization systems, discuss their security and identify some gaps in current solutions.