Stealth migration: Hiding virtual machines on the network

S. Achleitner, T. La Porta, P. McDaniel, S. V. Krishnamurthy, A. Poylisher, C. Serban

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Live virtual machine (VM) migration is commonly used for enabling dynamic resource or fault management, or for load balancing in datacenters or cloud platforms. A service hosted by a VM may also be migrated to prevent its visibility to an external adversary who may seek to disrupt its operation by launching a DDoS attack against it. We first show that current systems cannot adequately hide a VM migration from an external adversary. The key reason for this is that a migration typically manifests a traffic pattern with distinguishable statistical properties. We introduce two new attacks that can allow an adversary to effectively track a migration in progress, by leveraging observations of these properties. As our primary contribution, we design and implement a stealth migration framework that causes migration traffic to be indistinguishable from regular Internet traffic, with a negligible latency overhead of approximately 0.37 seconds, on average.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationINFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781509053360
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2 2017
Event2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2017 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: May 1 2017May 4 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Other

Other2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period5/1/175/4/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Computer Science
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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