Secure and Efficient Allocation of Virtual Machines in Cloud Data Center

Cloud computing provides a shared pool of configurable computing resources and significantly improves the utilization of computing resources, but it also introduces security threats. We focus on the virtual machine (VM) co-residency, which allows an attacker to launch cross-VM attacks against target VMs. To tackle this problem, we propose a secure and efficient VM allocation strategy to reduce the cross-VM attack threats while ensuring the efficiency of the cloud data center. First, we establish several metrics related to security and efficiency for the cloud data center. Then, we establish a constrained optimization model. Next, we allocate and migrate VMs based on typical suspicious or vulnerable VM features, and solve the optimization problem through our improved NSGA-II allocation. Finally, we implement our allocation strategy and conduct intensive experiments. The experimental results show that our allocation strategy performs better than the existing strategies and provides cloud vendors with tradeoff solutions.