Security-aware Real-time Scheduling for Hypervisors

Virtualization is critical to cloud computing because it simplifies the delivery of services by providing a platform for optimizing complex IT resources in a scalable manner. Virtualization architecture provides this illusion through hypervisors/Virtual Machine Monitor, which maps the physical resource to Virtual machines. Security is very essential for cloud users as they relinquish physical possession of their computation and data, which inevitably poses new security risks towards the confidentiality and integrity of the data. Lot of research is initiated in resource provisioning for hypervisors, but still many problems need to be addressed specially for security-aware and real time tasks. A dual objective scheduling algorithm, Real Time Security Maximization (RT-Smax), which aims to meet the deadline of the Virtual machines with best possible security is being proposed. Though this algorithm can be used by any hypervisor, for the current work it has been implemented on Xen VMM. Finally its effectiveness is validated by comparing it with Xen's credit scheduler on security demanding tasks having stringent deadline constraints.