A Survey on Virtual Machine Security

Virtualization plays a major role in helping the organizations to reduce the operational cost, and still ensuring improved efficiency, better utilization and flexibility of existing hardware. "Virtualization is both an opportunity and a threat says Patrick Lin, Senior director of Product Management for VMware" [4]. This paper presents a literature study on various security issues in virtualization technologies. Our study focus mainly on some open security vulnerabilities that virtualization brings to the environment. We concentrate on security issues that are unique for virtual machines. The security threats presented here are common to all the virtualization technologies available in the market, they are not specific to a single virtualization technology. We provide an overview of various virtualization technologies available in the market at the first place together with some security benefits that comes together with virtualization. Finally we provide a detailed discussion of several security holes in the virtualized environment.