One of the essential characteristics of cloud computing that revolutionized the IT business is the sharing of computing resources. Despite all the benefits, security is a major concern in a cloud virtualization environment. Among those security issues is securely managing the Virtual Machine (VM) images that contain operating systems, configured platforms, and data. Confidentiality, availability, and integrity of such images pose major concerns as it determines the overall security of the virtual machines. This paper identified and discussed the attributes that define the degree of security in VM images. It will address this problem by explaining the different methods and frameworks developed in the past to address implementing secure VM images. Finally, this paper analyses the security issues and attributes and proposes a framework that will include an approach that helps to develop secure VM images. This work aims to enhance the security of cloud environments
