V irtual machines image protection in Cloud computing

1. Virtual machines image protection in Cloud computing Muhammad Kazim (2011-NUST-MSCCS-23) Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad AwaisShibli G.E.C Members: Dr. Abdul GhafoorAbbasi Dr. Hamid Mukhtar Ms. RahatMasood

2. Agenda • Introduction • Motivation • Research Methodology • Problem Statement • Research Contributions • Implementation • Results • Conclusion

3. Introduction The core of Cloud services, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model provides the capability to provision; • Processing • Storage • Networks

4. Virtualization • In Cloud computing, Virtualization is the basis of providing IaaS. • A single system can concurrently run multiple isolated virtual machines (VMs), operating systems or multiple instances of a single operating system (OS). • Virtualization maximizes the jobs a single CPU can do. • Organizations are using virtualization to gain efficiency in platform and application hosting

5. Virtualization in Cloud Figure 1: Virtualization in Cloud

6. Virtual Disk Image • A single file or directory representing the hard drive of a guest operating system. • Encapsulates all components of a guest OS, including the applications and virtual resources used by guest OS. • Provides the ability to quickly launch and deploy virtual machines across various hosts.

7. Motivation • According to a survey, virtualization security is most important security issue in Cloud. • NIST, CSA and PCI DSS in their security guidelines for virtualization have emphasized the importance of virtualization and disk images security. • Disk images in storage can be compromised through attacks such as data leakage, malware installation on images and snapshot access in storage.

8. Problem Statement Virtual machine images are vulnerable to different attacks in Cloud storage. In order to secure virtual machines images from infrastructure, hypervisor and storage attacks, we have proposed a security mechanism that encrypts virtual machines images during storage.

9. Research Methodology Analysis of virtualization security Problem Statement Literature Survey Research Publication Framework Implementation Testing Design Framework Research Publication

10. Contributions • Theoretical (Two Research Publications) • Practical (Development of OpenStack Disk Image Encryption framework)

11. Conference Paper 1 Muhammad Kazim, RahatMasood, Muhammad AwaisShibli, Abdul GhafoorAbbasi, “Security Aspects of Virtualization in Cloud Computing”, 12th International Conference on Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management Applications, Krakow-Poland 2013, September 25-27. http://home.agh.edu.pl/~saeed/cisim2013/

12. Conference Paper 2 Muhammad Kazim, RahatMasood, Muhammad AwaisShibli, “Securing the virtual machine images in Cloud computing”, 6th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN 2013), ACM, November 26-28, 2013, Aksaray/Turkey. http://sinconf.org/sin2013/index.php

13. Virtual Machines

14. Disk Images

15. Implementation Perspective • Implement a framework that that ensures confidentiality of images through encryption • Images are decrypted when required by the VM • Use of hashing techniques to ensure integrity

16. OpenStack • Used in 178 different countries and more than 850 organizations including NASA, Rackspace, • Collection of open source components • Modular design • IaaS Cloud Services allows users to manage: VMs, Virtual networks, storage resources

17. OpenStack Components • Swift • Glance • Nova • Horizon • Keystone • Quantum • Cinder

18. Virtual Machines in OpenStack

19. OpenStack Swift Architecture • Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store. • Is maintained and developed by one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh. • Has 53,605 lines of code and is written in Python.

20. Components • Proxy Servers: Handles all incoming API requests. • Rings: Maps logical names of data to locations on particular disks. • Accounts & Containers: Each Account and Container are individual databases that are distributed across the cluster. An Account database contains the list of Containers in that Account. A Container database contains the list of Objects in that Container • Objects: The data itself. • Partitions: A Partition stores Objects, Account databases and Container databases.

21. Image Encryption Module In Swift

22. Image Decryption Module In Swift

23. IEM & IDM IEM & IDM

24. Deployment of OpenStack for development • Devstack • A documented shell script to build complete OpenStack development environments. • Deployment of Devstack • Setup a fresh supported Linux installation • Clone devstack from devstack • Deploy your OpenStack Cloud http://devstack.org/

25. Debugging of source code • Debugging of Swift through command line • Pdb (Python debugger)

26. Integration of Image Encryption and Decryption with Swift • Integrating Image encryption and decryption with OpenStack Swift image storage. • OpenStack Swift API is implemented as a set of ReSTful web services • The proxy server initiates an internal Swift PUT request to the object servers • Object servers processes images chunk by chunk so each chunk gets encrypted • Foe decryption object server decrypts each chunk before it sends the image to the proxy server

27. Demo • Running Devstack script • Add an image • Show it in Storage • Run a VM on it (it gets decrypted)

28. Results • Add a custom bootable image • Launch a VM • After VM termination, image is located into Swift encrypted storage • After VM termination, image is stored in encrypted state in Swift. • AES is block sized encryption, that adds extra padding to images • Encryption of images maintains their confidentiality in Cloud storage • Hash of image is taken before encryption. During decryption hash of image is calculated again, and compared with the original hash to ensure integrity of image.

29. Future Directions • Encryption of accounts to protect users and images lists in Swift. • Integration of Key Management protocol with Swift image encryption. • Encryption of persistent storage used by virtual machines during execution.

30. Conclusion • Image encryption module encrypts all virtual disk images before storage in OpenStack. They are decrypted when required by the virtual machine. • Integrity and confidentiality of virtual machine images in storage is ensured. They are secure from all possible storage attacks such as data theft, malware installation and hypervisor issues.

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