An optimized approach to protect virtual machine image integrity in cloud computing

The development of cloud computing is surely unprecedented in IT industry with many companies adapting to this new technology. The related companies undoubtedly benefit a lot from cloud computing. Meanwhile, the security of cloud platforms becomes one of the concerns for companies. As an important underlying component, the virtual machine image is also in need of especial protection. In this paper, we propose an optimized approach to protect the virtual machine image integrity. In the approach, we propose an architecture of integrity protection, optimize a hardware environment as the fundamental deployment environment, design a measurement module to measure and verify images, and design a strategy module to handle the results. Finally, we integrate it with OpenStack and evaluate its security and performance. The experiments demonstrate that our approach can protect the image integrity well and the measurement speed is increased three times faster than the ordinary approach with a little more resource consumption.