Threat Modelling of Virtual Machine Migration Auction

The auction process in Virtual Machine migration is a new concept to enhance the availability of the cloud resources by the business federation of Cloud Service Providers. In this process, the complete communication is performed over the Internet, which is in-secured. In addition, the VM auction is handled by the bidding module, which is a single application over the hypervisor. Though the hypervisor is carefully protected by available security techniques, we cannot ensure the security of the bidding module for this auction in VM migration. Before arguing the security of the VM migration auction system (VMMA), it is necessary to identify various threats to the system. Careful investigation enables the system administrator and its developer to build organized security requirements and protection mechanism. In this paper, we build a threat and security model for the VMMA system. The key components of the VMMA system are analyzed, and various possible threats are discussed. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.