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With the rapid growth of virtualization-based computing technologies, the demand of better security for virtualization is increased. For cloud IaaS providers, it is important to offer secured and vulnerability-free resources to the users for improving the quality of service. The research has shown that virtual machine (VM) created from the VM image contains vulnerabilities which can lead to serious security risks. The traditional in-VM vulnerability scanners require the user to maintain the VM scanning and patching software. In addition, scanning a VM at runtime is time-consuming and may require to pause the VM for specific time. We explore the feasibility of implementing risk assessment of a VM at entry level with negligible delay in VM provisioning. In this paper, we design an automated vulnerability assessment and patching framework for VMs. It finds the highly severe vulnerabilities through proper analysis of vulnerabilities and patch them. In addition, the VM risk is analyzed based on the unpatched vulnerabilities and high-risk VM undergo for the continuous monitoring. We validate the feasibility of the proposed framework on cloud test bed at NIT Goa by performing different experiments about vulnerability assessment and patching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtualization plays a vital role in the construction of cloud computing. However, various vulnerabilities are existing in current virtualization implementations, and thus there are various security challenges at virtualization layer. In this paper, we investigate different vulnerabilities and attacks at virtualization layer of cloud computing. We examine the proposals of cloud intrusion detection system (IDS) and intrusion detection and prevention system frameworks. We recommend the cloud IDS requirements and research scope to achieve desired level of security at virtualization layer of cloud computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing offers scalable on-demand services to consumers with greater flexibility and lesser infrastructure investment. Since Cloud services are delivered using classical network protocols and formats over the Internet, implicit vulnerabilities existing in these protocols as well as threats introduced by newer architectures raise many security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we survey the factors affecting Cloud computing adoption, vulnerabilities and attacks, and identify relevant solution directives to strengthen security and privacy in the Cloud environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]