A secure VM live migration technique in a cloud computing environment using blowfish and blockchain technology

Abstract

Data centres have become the backbone of infrastructure for delivering cloud services. In the emerging cloud computing paradigm, virtual machine (VM) live migration involves moving a running VM across hosts without visible interruption to the client. Security vulnerabilities, resource optimization, and maintaining the quality of service are key issues in live VM migration. Maintaining security in VM live migration is one of the critical concerns. To create a secure environment, this paper proposes a live migration technique using the blowfish cryptographic algorithm for encryption and decryption, along with blockchain technology, to address challenges such as decentralization, data privacy, and VM security. The algorithms, namely key management blowfish encryption (KMBE), access control searchable encryption (ACSE), protected searchable destination server (PSDS), and key expansion blowfish decryption (KEBD), improve security in VM live migration in terms of various parameters such as data centre request servicing time, response time, and data transfer cost. The proposed technique KMBE improves migration cost ($) by 60–70%, ACSE reduces overall energy consumption (w) by 70–80%, PSDS reduces makespan (ms) by 40–50%, and KEBD improves the security in live VM migration by 30–40%.