“I declare that I have read this project, in my opinion this project report has

satisfied the scope and quality for the award of the degree of Master of

Computer Science (Information Security).”

Signature :

Name of Supervisor : DR. MAZDAK ZAMANI

Date : JANUARY 2013

A MODEL TO ENHANCE SECURITY OF LIVE VIRTUAL MACHINE

MIGRATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING

KAMBIZ MOHAMMAD HOSSEINI

A project report submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the award of the degree of

Master of Computer Science (Information Security)

Advanced Informatics School (AIS)

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

JANUARY 2013

ii

I declare that this thesis entitled: “A MODEL TO ENHANCE SECURITY

OF LIVE VIRTUAL MACHINE MIGRATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING” is the

result of my own research except as cited in references. The thesis has not been

accepted for any degree and is degree and is not concurrently submitted in

candidature of any other degree.

Signature :

Name : KAMBIZ MOHAMMAD HOSSEINI

Date : 10th JANUARY 2013

iii

Dedicated to My Beloved wife

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

IN THE NAME OF GOD, MOST GRACIOUS, MOST COMPASSIONATE

May I express my appreciation to GOD, for giving me the blessing for health,

strength and earnestness to accomplish and fulfil this project report.

I would like to take this opportunity to say the highest appreciation to Dr.

Mazdak Zamani as my supervisor who always gives full support and faithfulness in

all guidance, advice and commitment upon on the effort for this project.

This appreciation also goes to my beloved wife, because of her uninterrupted

support during my study.

v

ABSTRACT

Cloud Computing has become a new effective technology in IT industries to

reduce the costs and increase the quality of service of any sort of services including

Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) and Software as a

service(SaaS). Virtual Machine is a basic unit of each cloud and as far as the security

is concerned, maintaining and reducing the vulnerabilities of Virtual Machines is a

must. In order to provide a cloud with the highest performance and least fault

tolerance, VM Live Migration was introduced, and it is being used many times in a

daily maintenance of a cloud, so keeping the process of Live Migration secure is a

principle in securing a cloud. Different approaches have been put forward for live

migration however, more investigation and concentration needs to be taken on the

concept of security on them. In this research MITM attacks are analysed and a new

model is introduced to enhance security of Virtual Machine Live Migration against

MITM which is using SSL to secure its connection.

vi

ABSTRAK

Pengkomputeran awan telah menjadi satu teknologi baru yang berkesan

dalam industri IT untuk mengurangkan kos dan meningkatkan kualiti perkhidmatan

apapun perkhidmatan termasuk Pelantar sebagai Perkhidmatan (PaaS), Infrastruktur

sebagai satu Perkhidmatan (IaaS) dan Perisian sebagai perkhidmatan (SaaS). Mesin

maya adalah satu unit asas setiap awan dan sejauh yang sebagai cagaran conserned,

maintaning dan mengurangkan kelemahan Mesin Virtual adalah satu kemestian.

Dalam usaha untuk menyediakan awan dengan prestasi hightest dan telorence

bersalah kurangnya, VM Live Migrasi telah diperkenalkan, dan digunakan banyak

kali dalam maitenance harian Awan 1, jadi menjaga proses Migrasi selamat Live

adalah prinsip dalam mendapatkan awan.Pendekatan yang berbeza telah

dikemukakan untuk Walau bagaimanapun, penghijrahan hidup, penyiasatan dan

cencentration yang lebih perlu diambil ke atas konsep keselamatan kepada mereka.

Dalam kajian ini serangan MITM dianalisis dan model baru yang diperkenalkan

untuk meningkatkan keselamatan Migrasi Virtual Machine Live terhadap MITM

yang menggunakan SSL untuk mendapatkan sambungan.

.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENT

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE

DECLARATION ii

DEDICATION iii

ACKNOWLEGMENTS iv

ABSTRACT v

ABSTRAK vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS vii

LIST OF TABLES xii

LIST OF FIGURES xiii

LIST OF ABBREVATIONS xv

LIST OF APPENDICES xvi

1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Introduction 1

1.1.1 History of Cloud Computing 2

1.1.2 Virtualization and Virtual Machine 3

1.1.3 Virtual Machine Migration 3

1.1.4 Live Virtual Machine Migration Security 4

1.2 Background of the problem 5

1.3 Problem Statement 6

1.4 Research Questions 7

1.5 Objectives of the Study 7

1.6 Project Aim 8

1.7 Scope of the Study 8

viii

2 LITERATURE REVIEW 9

2.1 Introduction 9

2.2 General concept of Virtualization 10

2.3 VM Migration 13

2.3.1 Pre-copy 14

2.3.2 Post-copy 15

2.4 VM Migration techniques 15

2.4.1 Stop-and-Copy Migration 15

2.4.2 Demand Migration 16

2.4.3 Iterative Pre-Copy Migration 17

2.5 How to do live migration 18

2.6 Benefits of live migration 19

2.7 Security Risks in Virtualization 19

2.8 Xensploit 20

2.9 SSL 21

2.9.1 SSL Overview 22

2.9.2 SSL server authentication 22

2.9.3 SSL client authentication 23

2.9.4 Encrypted SSL connection 24

2.9.5 Message Authentication Codes 25

2.9.6 Messages 26

2.9.7 Hello Request 26

2.9.8 Client Hello 26

2.9.9 Server Hello 27

2.10 Related Works 28

3 METHODOLOGY 31

3.1 Introduction 31

3.2 Operational Framework 32

3.2.1 Phase 1: reviewing existing VM Live Migration techniques. 33

3.2.2 Phase 2 : Proposing a model 34

3.2.3 Phase 3: Implementation of model on live migration 34

3.2.4 Phase 4: Analyzing different part of the implemented method 35

3.3 Tools and Equipments 35

3.4 Summary 35

4 DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION 36

4.1 Introduction 36

ix

4.2 Proposed Model 37

4.3 Installation and Servers Configuration 41

4.4 Attack scenario 47

4.5 Programs 49

5 TEST AND EVALUATION 53

5.1 Introduction 53

5.2 Proposed Model increases confidentiality and integrity. 53

5.2.1 Key Material Generation 54

5.3 Scheme to modify protocol 54

5.4 Security analysis 56

5.4.1 Resisting against fake root certificate: 56

5.4.2 SSL Strip 56

5.4.3 Implimentation of attack scenario 57

5.5 Comparing proposed model with other related works: 63

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK 65

6.1 Introduction 65

6.2 Summary of the Research 65

6.3 Project Contribution 66

6.4 Future Work 67

REFERENCES 68

APPENDICES 70-80

x

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE TITLE PAGE

2.1 Migration Technique 17

3.1 Operational Framework 32

4.1 Changes in Xen configuration file 46

5.1 Comparing different methods with proposed method 64

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE NO. TITLE PAGE

1.1 Evolution of Cloud Computing 2

1.2 Virtual Machine Migration 4

1.3 Virtual Migration 5

2.1 Application Virtualization 10

2.2 Operating System Virtualization 11

2.3 Full Virtualization 12

2.4 Para-virtualization 13

2.5 Virtual Machine Migration 14

2.6 The Steps conducted by the server to authenticate the client 15

2.7 The steps conducted by the client to authenticate the server 23

2.8 Client Hello Packet 24

2.9 Server Hello Packet 27

3.1 Phase1, investigation phase 28

3.2 Phase 2, Proposing model 33

4.1 Phase One of proposed model 34

4.2 Proposed model 38

4.3 Two Xen servers with one active domU 40

4.4 MITM attack 44

4.5 provider prehandshaking 48

4.6 Requester prehandshaking 50

4.7 Producing proposed shared key 51

5.1 SSL Modified Protocol 52

5.2 MITM attack 55

xii

5.3 ARP Poisoning 58

5.4 Client key exchange 59

5.5 Client change cipher spec 60

5.6 Client Finish without decryption 60

5.7 Client Finish with decryption 61

5.8 Server Change cipher spec 61

5.9 Server finish without decryption 61

5.10 Server finish with decryption 61

5.11 Installing RSA Private key in Wireshark 62

xiii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

OS - Operating System

IT - Information Technology

TLS - Transport Layer Security

SSL - Secure Socket Layer

CA - Certificate Authority

DNS - Domain Name System

STP - Spanning Tree Protocol

CAM - Content Addressable Memory

VM - Virtual Machine

MiTM - Man in the Middle

CPU - Central Processing Unit

VMM - Virtual Machine Monitor

JVM - Java Virtual Machine

TCP - Transmission Control Protocol

PaaS - Platform as a Service

IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

SaaS - Software as a Service

xiv

LIST OF APPENDICES

APPENDIX TITLE PAGE

A Plagiarism result 74

B Project Gantt chart 75

C Source code of the Programs 76

1

CHAPTER 1

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

Cloud Computing, one of the emerging technologies, has changed the world

of IT significantly by providing more affordable and effective computer services and

resources, which is beneficial for both providers and customers. There are three

different distinct layers in cloud computing, system layer, platform layer and

application layer and three service models, Platform as a Service (PaaS),

Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) and Software as a service(SaaS)(Foster et al., 2008).

2

1.1.1 History of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a model which, provide different part of services

including hardware such as servers, networks or software like applications and other

aspects which could be find in data centres. By doing this users and companies, that

use these services via Internet, are able to pay only for the amount of services that

they need not to hire a huge server and network and pay huge amount of money for

using only part of the capability of servers and pay for whole potential. In other

word, it is provided to enable convenient, network access when it is necessary to a

shared resources which are easy to configure and safe to use, that could be rapidly

served and start services with the least need of management by customers or service

provider communicating(Fogarty, 2009).

Figure 1.1 Evolution of Cloud Computing

The History of Cloud Computing went back to 1990 with an idea for making

computer power easy to access with Grid Computing. In this case accessibility was

supposed to be as easy as an electric power grid (Senthil Kumar S. , 2012). (Prof.

3

Ramnath Chellappa, 1977) used the term “cloud computing” for the first time in an

academic lecture.

1.1.2 Virtualization and Virtual Machine

The most important part of cloud computing which enables it to work meet

the goal of sharing resources is virtualization. Actually cloud computing use the

technology of virtualization to attract businesses to provide services with decreasing

the billing and increasing the quality of services. In virtualization software and

hardware are simulated upon which other software runs which is famous as VM

(virtual machine). Virtualization is greatly beneficial for both service provider and

service users because it provides features like multi-tenancy, better server utilization,

and data centre consolidation. Cloud providers are able to gain a great deal of

capacity which in turn it offers better margins, moreover, cloud users can use

virtualization to decrease expenditure on hardware and increase the performance

(Saraswat and Rohini, 2009).

1.1.3 Virtual Machine Migration

A virtual machine is capable to be transfered from one physical machine and

palced to another, in case that it is necessary (Voorsluys et al., 2009). virtual

machine cloning (to copy one virtual machine in different places), virtual machine

relocation (just moving from one host to another) are two example of VM

movement, generally these actions happen in case of maintenance or failure(Rogers

4

and Schroeder, 2008). Due to the ability of movement from one host to other hosts it

is used in high availability and disaster recovery plans and it increases the value of

using it. Figure 1.2 shows a virtual machine migration from one physical server to

another.

Figure 1.2: Virtual Machine Migration

1.1.4 Live Virtual Machine Migration Security

Although, advantages of cloud computing have absorbed attention of users to

itself, security issues decline the pace of adoption of cloud computing. Different

methods have been put forward to improve the Security of Cloud, however, still

collaboration to be taken to bring peace of mind to its user. One aspect which is a

concern in security in cloud is security issues during live Virtual Machine

migration(Lombardi and Di Pietro, 2010).

5

Figure 1.3: Virtual Migration

1.2 Background of the problem

There are lots of steps occur in system to perform live migration a VM

however, generally it is the memory image of source server transfer to destination

server (Voorsluys et al., 2009). the hypervisor which is responsible to manage virtual

machines pre-copies VM memory pages to destination server without disturbing the

OS or applications actually users do not realize that they are serving by another

server. In order to be sure that whole active memory transfer, The process of page

copying is continuously occurs several times and dirty pages repeatedly are moved.

Normally, the reason of repeating the process is that there are some pages that is

modified during the migration process as the system is totally active, so often that the

VM should be waited sometimes, until these dirty pages are fully transferred to the

destination. As a result of the process, the VM can be activated in the destination

server (Voorsluys et al., 2009),however, it needs to be sure that no copy of data left

6

behind in memory and data is not compromised while it was transferring

(confidentiality and integrity).

Providing integrity is the goal of securing data while they are moving. It

means that data should be stopped from being modified. Moreover, another concern

is to be ensuring that data remains secret when it is sending from server to client or

other servers and except the sender and the receiver, no one else should be able to

change or read data and in extreme case no one else should realize the data

transaction. Different ways have suggested to protect data which is transferring,

however, The most common and effective solution to protect it is to use encryption

and authentication in order to provide a situation that data pass through in

safely(Speake and Winkler, 2011).

Encryption is utilized to ensure that in case of compromising of integrity

between client and server data keeps confidential. Moreover, Authentication is

utilized to ensure that the data in communication of both client and server indicate

that who they say, they are.

Different method of authentication use cryptography algorithm in many

ways. Data transferring data by mean of programs, manual ftp, or browser by using

different services like HTTPS, TLS, or SSL are different example of security

protocols, which are used for that reason. PKI is used to authenticate the transaction

(trusted root CAs), and encryption are used to keep the payload secure(Speake and

Winkler, 2011).

1.3 Problem Statement

Different approaches have been put forwarded for VM migration, form

unsecure one (just a TCP connection) to relatively secure (through SSL).the point is

7

that there have been several attacks for even secured one with SSL connection(El‐

Hajj, 2012).

1.4 Research Questions

I. What are the approaches to secure Migration of VMs to prevent Man in the

middle attack in live migration in cloud computing?

II. How to design a new model for enhancement of security of VMs to prevent

Man in the middle attack in VM migration in cloud computing?

III. How to evaluate the enhanced security model in migration of VMs in cloud

computing?

1.5 Objectives of the Study

I. To identify and investigate approaches in secure Live Migration of VMs

to keep data safe against Man In The Middle attack in cloud computing.

II. To propose and design a model for enhancement of security of VMs to

prevent Man in the middle attack in VM migration in cloud computing.

III. To evaluate proposed enhanced security model in migration of VMs in

cloud computing.

8

1.6 Project Aim

The aim of this research is to propose a method to increase confidentiality

and integrity of data in motion in live VM migration and have a model for preventing

Man in the middle attack and make sure that data isolation which is one of main

purpose of virtualization is preserved. As a result, enhancing the overall cloud

security is expected to achieve.

1.7 Scope of the Study

In cloud computing, three types of services including Infrastructure, Platform,

and Software as a service are provided. this study focus on Infrastructure as a

service. This research will consider security concerns of virtualization in cloud

computing specially in VM migration to identify problems related to Man in the

middle attack among all virtualization threats. This research would focus on Xen

hypervisor which is one of the strongest and the most useable virtualization model.

Xen is open source and design by Cambridge University as a research project

(Barham et al., 2003).

68

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