Virtualization Technologies and Cloud Security: advantages, issues, and perspectives
This is an incremental review for cloud security practitioners, summarizing existing knowledge without introducing new methods.
The paper examines virtualization technologies in cloud computing, highlighting their role in enabling secure resource sharing and monitoring, while also addressing ongoing security vulnerabilities that compromise isolation.
Virtualization technologies allow multiple tenants to share physical resources with a degree of security and isolation that cannot be guaranteed by mere containerization. Further, virtualization allows protected transparent introspection of Virtual Machine activity and content, thus supporting additional control and monitoring. These features provide an explanation, although partial, of why virtualization has been an enabler for the flourishing of cloud services. Nevertheless, security and privacy issues are still present in virtualization technology and hence in Cloud platforms. As an example, even hardware virtualization protection/isolation is far from being perfect and uncircumventable, as recently discovered vulnerabilities show. The objective of this paper is to shed light on current virtualization technology and its evolution from the point of view of security, having as an objective its applications to the Cloud setting.