Swiper exploiting virtual machine vulnerability in third party clouds with competition for io resources
- 1. Swiper: Exploiting Virtual Machine Vulnerability in Third-Party Clouds with Competition for I/O Resources Abstract: The emerging paradigm of cloud computing, e.g., Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), promises a highly flexible yet robust environment for large-scale applications. Ideally, while multiple virtual machines (VM) share the same physical resources (e.g., CPUs, caches, DRAM, and I/O devices), each application should be allocated to an independently managed VM and isolated from one another. Unfortunately, the absence of physical isolation inevitably opens doors to a number of security threats. In this paper, we demonstrate in EC2 a new type of security vulnerability caused by competition between virtual I/O workloads-i.e., by leveraging the competition for shared resources, an adversary could intentionally slow down the execution of a targeted application in a VM that shares the same hardware. In particular, we focus on I/O resources such as hard-drive throughput and/or network bandwidth-which are critical for data-intensive applications. We design and implement Swiper, a framework which uses a carefully designed workload to incur significant delays on the targeted application and VM with minimum cost (i.e., resource consumption). We
- 2. conduct a comprehensive set of experiments in EC2, which clearly demonstrates that Swiper is capable of significantly slowing down various server applications while consuming a small amount of resources. Hardware Requirements: • System : Pentium IV 2.4 GHz. • Hard Disk ` : 40 GB. • Floppy Drive : 1.44 Mb. • Monitor : 15 VGA Colour. • Mouse : Logitech. • RAM : 256 Mb. Software Requirements: • Operating system : - Windows XP. • Front End : - JSP • Back End : - SQL Server Software Requirements: • Operating system : - Windows XP.
- 3. • Front End : - .Net • Back End : - SQL Server