US Patent 9729517 Secure virtual machine migration

A formalized set of interfaces (e.g., application programming interfaces (APIs)) is described, that uses a security scheme, such as asymmetric (or symmetric) cryptography, in order to enable secure migration of virtual machine instances between multiple host computing devices. The migration is performed by receiving a request to migrate a virtual machine where the request includes public keys for the source host computing and the destination host computing. The source and destination hosts use the public keys to establish an encrypted session and then use the encrypted session to migrate the virtual machine.