A Secure Architecture for Inter-cloud Virtual Machine Migration

Virtual machine migration is an important tool that can be used in cloud computing environment for load balancing, disaster recovery, server consolidation, hardware maintenance, etc. Currently a few techniques have been proposed to secure the virtual machine migration process. However, these techniques have number of limitations e.g. lack of standard access control, mutual authentication, confidentiality, non-repudiation and integrity of VM data. Some of the techniques provide security services such as mutual authentication using TPM (Trusted Platform Module), however, not all the hardware platforms yet possess the TPM capability. This limits the deployment of such solutions in legacy systems. The architecture, presented in this paper, attempts to overcome these limitations with existing hardware support. In particular, we designed a secure and efficient protocol that migrates virtual machine from source cloud domain to destination cloud domain by considering fundamental security services such as confidentiality, integrity, standard access control and