C2Hunter: Detection and Mitigation of Covert Channels in Data Centers

Data centers provides both the applications, systems software and the hardware as services over the Internet, which is named cloud computing [1–3]. It is core infrastructure of cloud computing, supporting dynamic deployment and elastic resource management. With the powerful computing and storing capabilities, cloud computing has become increasingly popular [4, 5]. The fundamental mechanism of cloud is virtualization which allows virtual machines (VM) instantiate stand-alone operating systems on demand based on a software layer called virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hypervisor [6]. Although the virtualization technology provides strong isolation for the cloud, security and privacy are always the open problems [7]. Some of the problems are essentially traditional web application and data-hosting ones, e.g., phishing, downtime, data loss, and password weakness. One of the new problems introduced by the shared environment to cloud computing is the covert channel attack [8]. By this way, information is leaked from the data centers and meanwhile the security provided by isolation is breaken down [9, 10].