Security Implications of Virtualization: A Literature Study

Abstract

Server virtualization is a key technology for today's data centers, allowing dedicated hardware to be turned into resources that can be used on demand.However, in spite of its important role, the overall security impact of virtualization is not well understood.To remedy this situation, we have performed a systematic literature review on the security effects of virtualization. Our study shows that, given adequate management, the core virtualization technology has a clear positive effect on availability, but that the effect on confidentiality and integrity is less positive.Virtualized systems tend to lose the properties of location-boundedness, uniqueness and monotonicity.In order to ensure corporate and private data security, we propose to either remove or tightly manage non-essential features such as introspection, rollback and transfer.