Hey, you, get off of my cloud

Third-party cloud computing represents the promise of outsourcing as applied to computation. Services, such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2, allow users to instantiate virtual machines (VMs) on demand and thus purchase precisely the capacity they require when they require it. In turn, the use of virtualization allows third-party cloud providers to maximize the utilization of their sunk capital costs by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared physical infrastructure. However, in this paper, we show that this approach can also introduce new vulnerabilities. Using the Amazon EC2 service as a case study, we show that it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, identify where a particular…