Hidden Channel Attack in Virtual Machine Manager

Running head: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
Information and Communication Technology
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1INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
Introduction:
Virtual Machine Manager is also known as the “hypervisor” is considered to be one of
the many of the hardware virtualization technique that is associated with allowing the
multiple operating system also known as guest to operate in a concurrent way with the host
computer. This is also named like this because conceptually it is placed on one level higher
that the supervisory program (Masdari, Nabavi, & Ahmadi, 2016). A virtual operating
platform is provided to the guest by the hypervisor which is associated with managing the
executions done by the guest operating system. There exists multiple cases where it is seen
that different types of operating systems are associated with sharing of hardware resources
which are virtualized in nature (Felter et al., 2015). This are generally installed in the server
hardware which is only assigned with the task of running the guest operating systems.
Whereas the non-hypervisor virtualization systems are generally used for tasks of similar
kind on a dedicated server hardware. But this is also commonly used in the desktops, portable
as well as in the handheld computers. This term is often used for the purpose of describing
the interface that is provided by the specific cloud-computing functionality known as the IaaS
or the Infrastructure as a Service.
Background:
VM are generally very mobile in nature and the abstraction which occurs in this are
associated with making the VM independent of the hardware underlying it. The traditional
software are generally coupled tightly with the server hardware underlying which means that
the moving of application to some other server generally requires a lot of time and are prone
to errors during the reinstallation and reconfiguration of the application. By comparison a
hypervisor is associated with making the underlying hardware details very much irrelevant
for the virtual machines, this in turn is associated with allowing the virtual machines to be

2INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
moved or migrated between any of the local or remote virtualized servers which is associated
with sufficient amount of computing resources that are available. This is almost done at will
and with effective rate of zero disruption to the virtual machines. This is the feature which is
often termed as live migration.
Hidden Channel Attack:
This is a very sophisticated attack in the hypervisors. Place where, there exists the
hypervisors might be affected due to hidden channel attacks. In this type of attacks the
information are exploited which are generally gathered from the usage of the virtual
resources. In this type of attack a malicious attacker is associated with placing a VM
malicious in nature which acts as a co-residential of the targeted VM so as to make sure that
the same hardware resources are being used. Followed by this the attacker is associated with
the extraction of the useful information and this might be including the cryptographic keys
from the targeted virtual machines (Kumar et al., 2015). This in turn are used for the purpose
of eavesdropping of the traffic and man-in-middle attacks. By making use of the hidden
channel attack it is possible for the attacker to share the same cache as that of the victim
because the victim is capable of monitoring the cache access behaviour. One such example is
that the attacker is having the capability of monitoring the cache information related to the
timing means of measuring the time of execution of various kind of operations in the virtual
machine of the victim (Sharma et al., 2016). But in general the attacker is associated with the
exploitation of the timings present in the share cache memory of high level. Besides this the
consumption of power or leakage in the electromagnetic elements might also be used as a
vector for the purpose of launching the hidden channel attacks.
Cache based hidden channel attack is the type of attack where it is seen that the
caches which are being tested are generally existing in between the various type of new day