SECURITY AWARENESS IN VIRTUALIZED SERVER BASED COMPUTING: THREAT SOURCES AND ATTACK TYPES IN HYPERVISORS

Abstract

This paper presents the state of security awareness among key personnel managing virtualized server-based infrastructures. Major security issues assessed are those associated with hypervisor Threat Sources and Attack Types. An inductive approach was used to determine six Threat Sources and six Attack Types through documentary review of relevant literature. The Threat Sources include virtual machine communication, hypervisor intrusion, network sources and malpractices of server administrators. The Attack Types include hypervisor modification, denial of service, isolation breakage in hypervisor, multitenancy issues, virtualization sprawl and data compliance issues across multiple virtual machines. A statistical approach using the Mann-Whitney U statistical test was used to quantify 38 sets of data collected inform of a 5Likert scale questionnaire submitted by 24 public and private organizations based in Tanzania. In assessing reliability analysis, a Cronbach's Alpha with values of 0.986 and 0.960 were obtained for Threat Sources and Attack Types respectively signifying high reliability and excellent internal consistency of test items. Generally, for the Threat Sources tested, a moderate awareness level was found. On the other hand, awareness level of Attack Types was found to be not satisfactory. There is a notably low level of awareness of attacks due to isolation breakage in hypervisors, multi-tenancy issues, virtualization sprawls and data compliance issues. Isolation breakage was the most unknown attack types by far; hence the risk of spreading infected virtual machines across computing infrastructures is high. About 50% of the adopters cannot handle data compliance issues especially in heterogeneous environment. More specifically, the Mann-Whitney U was also used to determine association between awareness levels of threats and attacks in public and private adopters. Private adopters had higher mean ranks showing higher awareness of all security aspects compared to public adopters. A significant association was seen in the awareness of hypervisor modification and multi-tenancy issues by private adopters. Awareness levels of hypervisor Threat Sources and Attack Types is not acceptable enough to ensure maximum protection of systems and data in virtualized infrastructures. The study reveals existence of a serious knowledge gap among adopters which implies high operational risks. The need to capacitate skills development is vital for adopters to attain maximum security of their assets.