Assessing software integrity of virtual appliances through software whitelists: Is it any good?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Virtual appliances (VAs) are ready-to-use virtual machine images that are configured for specific purposes in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. This paper evaluates the integrity of software packages installed on realworld VAs through the use of a software whitelist-based framework. Analysis of 151 Amazon VAs using this framework shows that there is significant variance in the software integrity across VAs and that about 9% of real-world VAs have significant numbers of software packages that contain unknown files, making them potentially untrusted. Virus scanners flagged just half of the VAs in that 9% as malicious, though, demonstrating that virus scanning alone is not sufficient to help users select a trustable VA.
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