Evaluating survivability and costs of three virtual machine based server architectures

Virtual machine based services are becoming predominant in data centers or cloud computing since virtual machines can provide strong isolation and better monitoring for security purposes. While there are many promising security techniques based on virtual machines, it is not clear how significant the difference between various system architectures can be in term of survivability. In this paper, we analyze the survivability of three virtual machine based architectures — load balancing architecture, isolated service architecture, and BFT architecture. Both the survivability based on the availability and the survivability under sustained attacks for each architecture are analyzed. Furthermore, the costs of each architecture are compared. The results show that even if the same set of commercial off the shell (COTS) software are used, the performance of various service architectures are largely different in surviving attacks. Our results can be used as guidelines in the service architecture design when survivability to attacks is important.

1 INTRODUCTION

Virtual machine technology provides strong isolation and better monitoring capability at the virtual machine monitor level. Once attacks happen, though it is possible, it is hard for the attacker to break into the virtual machine monitor to compromise other virtual machines or avoid being monitored. Therefore, virtual machine technology is widely used in cloud computing and data centers as a preliminary approach in various service architectures.