Characterizing hypervisor vulnerabilities in cloud computing servers

The rise of the Cloud Computing paradigm has led to security concerns, taking into account that resources are shared and mediated by a Hypervisor which may be targeted by rogue guest VMs and remote attackers. In order to better define the threats to which a cloud server's Hypervisor is exposed, we conducted a thorough analysis of the codebase of two popular open-source Hypervisors, Xen and KVM, followed by an extensive study of the vulnerability reports associated with them. Based on our findings, we propose a characterization of Hypervisor Vulnerabilities comprised of three dimensions: the trigger source (i.e. where the attacker is located), the attack vector (i.e. the Hypervisor functionality that enables the security breach), and the attack target (i.e. the runtime domain that is compromised). This can be used to understand potential paths different attacks can take, and which vulnerabilities enable them. Moreover, most common paths can be discovered to learn where the defenses should be focused, or conversely, least common paths can be used to find yet-unexplored ways attackers may use to get into the system.