Abstract
Multitenancy and virtualization features of cloud computing enhance resource utilization and lower the cloud provider total cost of hosting customers data for big data applications. However, the cloud computing has many security challenges that are exacerbated by virtual resource sharing. In particular, sharing of resources among potentially untrusted tenants can result in an increased risk of information leakage due to vulnerability of virtual resources causing side channel attacks or VM escape. For the big data applications, an access control policy such as RBAC can be used to control the data sharing among cloud customers. However, an unintelligent cloud resources management mechanism can significantly increase the risk of data leakage among roles. The goal of this paper is to develop efficient risk-aware virtual resource assignment mechanisms for Cloud’s multitenant environment. The objective is to minimize of risk of information leakage due to Cloud virtual resources vulnerability. Such an assignment problem is shown to be NP-Complete. We present several scheduling heuristics including a scalable solution and compare their relative performance.