A Misuse Pattern for Compromising VMs via Virtual Machine Escape in NFV

Cloud computing has provided many services to potential consumers; one of these services being the provision of network functions using virtualization. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging network technology that decouples the software implementation of network functions from the underlying hardware providing flexible and energy-efficient network services. However, it also comes with vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to disrupt the network service. In this paper, we use misuse patterns to study the Virtual Machine (VM) Escape attack. The possible misuses resulting from the VM Escape are compromising victims' VMs, stealing resources from co-resident VMs, and accessing host OS files. Misuse patterns describe how an attack is performed from the point view of the attacker. In the future, we aim to build a partial catalog of misuse patterns for the NFV virtual machine environment (VME). This catalog would be useful to build a Security Reference Architecture for NFV.