A Review of Game-Theoretic Approaches for Secure Virtual Machine Resource Allocation in Cloud

Cloud Computing is a new evolutionary and dynamic platform that makes use of virtualization technology. In Cloud computing environment, virtualization abstracts the hardware system resources in software so that each application can be run in an isolated environment called the virtual machine and hypervisor does the allocation of virtual machines to different users that are hosted on same server. Although it provides many benefits like resource-sharing, cost-efficiency, high-performance computability and decrease in hardware cost but it also imposes a number of security threats. The threats can be directly on Virtual Machines (VMs) or indirectly on Hyper-visor through virtual machines that are hosted on it. This paper presents a review of all possible security threats and also their countermeasures by using Game-Theoretic approaches. Game Theory can be used as a defensive measure because of independent and strategic rational decision making nature of cloud users where each player would compete for best possible solution