Optimization of Security Policies on Virtual Machines using Flow Differentiator & Zone Manager

Security is considered as most crucial aspect in cloud computing. It has attracted lots of research in the recent years. On the other hand, attackers are exploring and exploiting the vulnerabilities in cloud. The heart of the Cloud computing lies in Virtualization technology. Attackers are taking the advantage of vulnerabilities in Virtual Machines and they can able to compromise virtual machines thereby launching DDOS attacks. Services such as Saas, IaaS which are meant to support end users may get affected and attackers may launch attacks either directly or by using zombies. Generally, Data Centres own security policies for dealing with security issues. Suppose in case of DDoS attacks, only the policies which deals with it , can only been applied. However, in datacentres, all the security policies are commonly been applied on the applications irrespective of their category or security threats that it face. The existing approach consumes lots of time and wastage of resources. In this paper, we have developed an approach to segregate the applications as per the type or threats (by adapting detection mechanisms) being faced . Based on the zone in which it is lying , only the relevant security policies will only be applied. This approach is optimized where we can efficiently reduce the latency associated with applying security policies. 1.INTRODUCTION Virtualization is considered as back bone for cloud computing with which users can access multiple instances of apps, resources etc. Virtualization technology will allow one computer to do the job of multiple computers. This environment let one computer host multiple operating systems at the same time. It transforms hardware into software. It is emulation of a fully functional virtual computer that can run its own applications and operating system and also Creates virtual elements of the CPU, RAM, and hard disk. Hardware-independence of operating system and applications. Hence, using virtualization it is possible to run operating systems and multiply applications on the same SERVER at the same time, thereby it raises the utilization and flexibility of hardware. Some of the virtualization technologies include VMWare, Hyper V, Virtual Iron etc., 1.1Virtual Machines These are the things that can manage OS and application as a Single unit by encapsulating them into Virtual Machines. A Virtual machine (VM) is an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine. Virtual machines can be provisioned to any system Duplicate: The behaviour of the VM should be identical to the real machine. There is no differentiation with respect to the execution of the program at the low level. Isolate: Multiple Virtual Instances corresponding to different VMs execute without interfering with each other. Efficient: VM should operate at the speed of the underlying hardware. Fig 1: VIRTUALIZATION All the resources of the physical computer are shared to create the virtual machines.By virtualization, it creates an emulation that user is actually using owned resources. But at the implementation level, these resources are shared between multiple number of users at any given point in time. Further, Disks are partitioned into virtual disks and a normal user time sharing terminal serves as Virtual machine operators console. Fig 2: Virtual Machine & Its Layers J.Madhulatha et al, / (IJCSIT) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, Vol. 5 (5) , 2014, 6336-6340