Isolation in Public Clouds: Threats, Challenges, and Defenses

Isolation in Public Clouds: Threats, Challenges, and DefensesMany applications that are in day to day use by customers over the Internet are hosted in the public clouds. Public clouds such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure allow clients to run virtual machines (VMs) on shared physical infrastructure. This practice of multi tenancy improves efficiency by multiplexing resources among disparate customers at low costs. Unfortunately, it also introduces the risk of sharing a physical server to

Many applications that are in day-to-day use by customers over the
Internet are hosted in the public clouds. Public
clouds such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft
Azure allow clients to run virtual machines (VMs) on shared physical
infrastructure. This practice of multi-tenancy improves efficiency by
multiplexing resources among disparate customers at low costs. Unfortunately,
it also introduces the risk of sharing a physical server to run both
sensitive customer applications and VMs that may belong to an arbitrary
and potentially malicious users. In this book, we focus on one of the main security threats uniquely arises in public clouds, cross-VM attacks, and evaluate how the
cloud infrastructure fares against these attacks.