Security Challenges on the Clone, Snapshot, Migration and Rollback of Xen Based Computing Environments

Abstract

While virtual machines provide significant flexibility for users and administrators to clone, snapshot, migration and rollback with unprecedented ease, it also bring forth some new problems and negative effects to the security of computing environments. The applications and operating systems are forced to run in a dynamical and unregulated computing environment, which gives rise to so radical difference that the administrator is difficult to maintain the security of computing environment. This paper summarizes and presents some types of security challenges based on existing viewpoints, then we analysis the similar challenges in Xen and discuss the potential directions and implementations for modifying it to adapt to these challenges.