https://www.mdu.se/

This paper presents NODEGUARD, a security approach for detecting and isolating misbehaving Virtual Machines (VMs) in multi-tenant virtualized cloud data centers, based on the Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) monitoring primitives. NODEGUARD employs a divide-and-conquer strategy that checks logical groups of VMs to ensure the efficiency of the detection mechanisms which opportunistically approaches a complexity of O (log(2)(n)) when there is a relatively low number of hostile VMs. This greatly enhances the algorithmic time complexity of the proposed security system compared to the O(n) complexity achieved by the traditional VMI inspection strategy that checks each VM separately. The approach has been evaluated in a virtualized cloud environment using the Mininet network emulator.