Towards designing secure virtualized systems

Virtual machine technology is rapidly gaining acceptance as a fundamental building block in enterprise data centers. It is most known for improving efficiency and ease of management. However, it also provides a compelling approach to enhancing system security, offering new ways to rearchitect todays systems and opening the door for a wide range of future security technologies. While this technology is meant to enhance the security of computer systems, some recent attacks show that virtual machine technology has many weaknesses and becomes exposed to many security threats. In this paper we present some of these threats and show how we protect these systems through intrusion detection and security policies mechanisms.