Benchmarking the Security of Virtualization Infrastructures: Motivation and Approach

摘要

With the growing adoption of cloud computing for business systems, the efforts to keep those environments secure are also increasing. Virtualization infrastructures are key to support such systems, but engineers lack means to help them in selecting the best solutions according to their security requirements. The goal of this work is to define and develop a benchmarking approach to assess and compare the security of virtualization infrastructures. The approach allows the benchmark user to define his usage scenario, which will influence the assessment metrics and quality model. Well established performance benchmarks will be used as workload. The evaluation procedure comprises two key phases: i) security qualification to make sure that detectable/known vulnerabilities are not present; ii) trustworthiness assessment to gather further evidences of the system security. We believe this approach will allow assessing and comparing systems in terms of security, thus helping IaaS providers to select the best infrastructure for their specific needs.