Secure Co-resident virtualization in multicore systems by VM pinning and page coloring

Cloud computing adoption and diffusion are threatened by unresolved security issues that affect both the cloud provider and the cloud user. In case of cloud, data from potentially competing sources could reside on the same disk or same memory structure, and a computer process can violate its virtual boundary to access the competitor´s data. Current Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) used in cloud provide a good isolation in high level computing resources viz. memory, CPU, I/O devices. However, when looking at usage of shared cache, it may happen that one virtual machine (VM) interferes with another co-resident virtual machine due to uncontrolled cache sharing. Here performance isolation cannot be guaranteed and one VM may extract sensitive information from another VM. The proposed solution is intended to isolate the usage of shared cache by co-resident VMs and thus ensure no inter-VM interference.