Classifying malware attacks in IaaS cloud environments

Journal of Cloud Computing

Advances, Systems and Applications

Table 4 Characterization of the different attacks originating from VMs

Attacks	Impact	Detectability	Countermeasures	Complx.	Ref.
Network-based	C/A	E: Net. monitoring	Secure channel (encryption)	Low	[38, 55]
VM-DoS	A	E: Net. monitoring	QoS management	Low	[37]
Cache side-channels	C	D: heuristics and code, RTSC	Static & dynamic page coloring	High	[56]
Mem. deduplication side-Channels	C	D: heuristics and code, RTSC	Fuzzy timers	High	[40, 57]
Co-residency detection	none	D: Attack specific	Unresolved problem	Low	[24]
VM Escape	C/A/I	Unresolved problem	Patching, software engineering formal verification	Low/Med.	[45, 46]
Hypervisor-DoS	A	E: Availability monitoring	Good isolation	Low	[58–60]
Hypervisor info. Gain	C	D/unresolved	Good isolation	Low	[43]
Anti-VMI Attacks	none	Unresolved problem	Difficult: Attack specific	Medium	[49, 50]