Biblio

The paper provides an analysis of the performance of an administrative component that helps the hypervisor to manage the resources of guest operating systems under fluctuation workload. The additional administrative component provides an extra layer of security to the guest operating systems and system as a whole. In this study, an administrative component was implemented by using Xen-hypervisor based para-virtualization technique and assigned some additional roles and responsibilities that reduce hypervisor workload. The study measured the resource utilizations of an administrative component when excessive input/output load passes passing through the system. Performance was measured in terms of bandwidth and CPU utilisation Based on the analysis of administrative component performance recommendations have been provided with the goal to improve system availability. Recommendations included detection of the performance saturation point that indicates the necessity to start load balancing procedures for the administrative component in the virtualized environment.

This research aims to identify some vulnerabilities of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks using multiple simulated attacks in a virtualized environment. Our experimental study shows that while updating the antivirus software and the operating system with the latest patches may help in mitigating APTs, APT threat vectors could still infiltrate the strongest defenses. Accordingly, we highlight some critical areas of security concern that need to be addressed.

Server honey pots are computer systems that hide in a network capturing attack packets. As the name goes, server honey pots are installed in server machines running a set of services. Enterprises and government organisations deploy these honey pots to know the extent of attacks on their network. Since, most of the recent attacks are advanced persistent attacks there is much research work going on in building better peripheral security measures. In this paper, the authors have deployed several honey pots in a virtualized environment to gather traces of malicious activities. The network infrastructure is resilient and provides much information about hacker's activities. It is cost-effective and can be easily deployed in any organisation without specialized hardware.