Isolation in Public Clouds: Threats, Challenges, and Defenses

Many applications that are in day-to-day use by customers over the Internet are hosted in the public clouds. Public clouds such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure allow clients to run virtual machines (VMs) on shared physical infrastructure. This practice of multi-tenancy improves efficiency by multiplexing resources among disparate customers at low costs. Unfortunately, it also introduces the risk of sharing a physical server to run both sensitive customer applications and VMs that may belong to an arbitrary and potentially malicious users. In this book, we focus on one of the main security threats uniquely arises in public clouds, cross-VM attacks, and evaluate how the cloud infrastructure fares against these attacks.