CloudAuditor: A Cloud Auditing Framework Based on Nested Virtualization

Recent years witness the successful adoption of Cloud computing. However, security remains the top concern for cloud users. The fundamental issue is that cloud providers cannot convince cloud users the trustworthiness of cloud platforms. In this paper, we propose a cloud auditing framework, named CloudAuditor, to examine the behaviors of cloud platforms. By leveraging nested virtualization technology, CloudAuditor could identify the stealthy memory and disk access from cloud platforms to users' virtual machines and can support the mainstream IaaS platforms such as VMware, Xen and KVM. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of CloudAuditor through comprehensive experiments. The results show that CloudAuditor can identify the suspicious behaviors of cloud platforms with acceptable performance overhead.