Automated Live Migration in OpenStack:A Moving Target Defense Solution

Cloud computing has become one of the most promising fields in information technology in recent years. Many big players such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are playing vital roles in the proliferation and adoption of cloud technologies. Besides them, the availability of free open source Cloud platform is also helping the spread of cloud computing adoption greatly. OpenStack is a free open source Cloud computing software originally released by Rackspace and NASA. Security issues have always been concerns for the cloud customers. Live migration of virtual machine instances from one physical machine to a different physical machine could be a potential for security threats in cloud computing. The live migration technology in the domain of OpenStack cloud can be regarded as Moving Target Defense (MTD) as the targeted physical machine is offloading its resident virtual machine instances to a different physical machine. Our contribution in this paper is the implementation of automated live migration in OpenStack cloud environment triggered by an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and its performance analysis. We also analyze how it will affect the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between customers and service providers. Our future work is centered on monitoring the migration aspects to detect and prevent hacking. Keywords: Cloud computing; Live migration, OpenStack; Moving target defense (MTD)