HyperShield: An Automated Evaluation Platform for Security and Performance Trade-Offs in Virtual Systems

Virtualization is the building block of modern cloud computing infrastructure. However, it remains vulnerable to a range of security threats, including malicious co-located tenants, hypervisor vulnerabilities, and side-channel attacks. These threats are generally mitigated by developing and deploying advanced and complex security solutions that incur significant performance overhead. Prior work on virtual machines (VMs) and containers has mainly evaluated basic security solutions, such as firewalls, using narrow performance metrics and synthetic models within limited evaluation frameworks. These studies often overlook advanced security modules in both user and kernel space, lack the flexibility to incorporate emerging features, and fail to capture detailed system-level impacts. We address these gaps with HyperShield, an open-source framework for unified security evaluation across VMs and containers that mimics a realistic cloud infrastructure. HyperShield supports advanced security modules in both user and kernel space, providing rich system-level performance metrics for comprehensive evaluation. Our performance evaluation shows that containers generally outperform VMs due to their lower virtualization overhead, achieving a throughput of 9.38 Gb/s compared to 1.98 Gb/s for VMs for our benchmarks. However, VMs’ performance is comparable for kernel-space deployments, as Docker uses the shared kernel space of the Docker bridge, which can result in packet congestion. In latency-sensitive workloads, VM access latency of 14.91 ms is comparable to Docker’s 12.86 ms. In storage benchmarks, FIO, however, VMs outperform Docker due to the overhead of Docker’s layered, copy-on-write file system, whereas VMs leverage optimized virtual block devices with near-native I/O performance. These results highlight performance dependencies on benchmark choice, trade-offs in deploying security workloads between user and kernel space, and the choice of containers and virtual machines as virtualization environments. Therefore, HyperShield provides a comprehensive evaluation toolkit for exploring an optimal security-module deployment strategy.