Toward inter-VM visibility in a Cloud environment using packet inspection

Virtualization is one of the key elements of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Cloud Computing (CC) offerings and private Clouds, and it is increasingly used in portions of the back-end of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and SaaS (Software as a Service) providers as well. This creates new targets for intrusion due to the complexity of access and difficulty in monitoring all interconnection points between systems, applications, and data sets. This raises many questions about the appropriate infrastructure, processes, and strategy for enacting detection and response to intrusion in a Cloud environment. This article discusses the security and the visibility issues of inter-VM traffic and solutions for it within a Cloud environment context, by proposing an approach relying on distributed intrusion detection technique and packet inspection.