Secure Virtualization and Multicore Platforms State-of-the-Art report

SVaM

Thin Hypervisor-Based Security Architectures for Embedded Platforms

Virtualization has grown increasingly popular, thanks to its benefits of isolation, management, and utilization, supported by hardware advances. It is also receiving attention for its potential to support security, through hypervisor-based services and advanced protections supplied to guests. Today, virtualization is even making inroads in the embedded space, and embedded systems, with their security needs, have already started to benefit from virtualization’s security potential. In this thesis, we investigate the possibilities for thin hypervisor-based security on embedded platforms. In addition to significant background study, we present implementation of a low-footprint, thin hypervisor capable of providing security protections to a single FreeRTOS guest kernel on ARM. Backed by performance test results, our hypervisor provides security to a formerly unsecured kernel with minimal performance overhead, and represents a first step in a greater research effort into the security advantages and possibilities of embedded thin hypervisors. Our results show that thin hypervisors are both possible and beneficial even on limited embedded systems, and sets the stage for more advanced investigations, implementations, and security applications in the future

Trust Evaluation for Embedded Systems Security research challenges identified from an incident network scenario

This paper is about trust establishment and trust evaluations techniques. A short background about trust, trusted computing and security in embedded systems is given. An analysis has been done of an incident network scenario with roaming users and a set of basic security needs has been identified. These needs have been used to derive security requirements for devices and systems, supporting the considered scenario. Using the requirements, a list of major security challenges for future research regarding trust establishment in dynamic networks have been collected and elaboration on some different approaches for future research has been done.This work was supported by the Knowledge foundation and RISE within the ARIES project

State of The Art and Hot Aspects in Cloud Data Storage Security

Along with the evolution of cloud computing and cloud storage towards matu- rity, researchers have analyzed an increasing range of cloud computing security aspects, data security being an important topic in this area. In this paper, we examine the state of the art in cloud storage security through an overview of selected peer reviewed publications. We address the question of defining cloud storage security and its different aspects, as well as enumerate the main vec- tors of attack on cloud storage. The reviewed papers present techniques for key management and controlled disclosure of encrypted data in cloud storage, while novel ideas regarding secure operations on encrypted data and methods for pro- tection of data in fully virtualized environments provide a glimpse of the toolbox available for securing cloud storage. Finally, new challenges such as emergent government regulation call for solutions to problems that did not receive enough attention in earlier stages of cloud computing, such as for example geographical location of data. The methods presented in the papers selected for this review represent only a small fraction of the wide research effort within cloud storage security. Nevertheless, they serve as an indication of the diversity of problems that are being addressed

Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

Maruchi OS kankyo o shiensuru sofutowea oyobi hadowea kino no teian

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3534号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2012/2/25 ; 早大学位記番号:新587

Towards model-driven engineering for mixed-criticality systems: multiPARTES approach

Mixed criticality systems emerges as a suitable solution for dealing with the complexity, performance and costs of future embedded and dependable systems. However, this paradigm adds additional complexity to their development. This paper proposes an approach for dealing with this scenario that relies on hardware virtualization and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Hardware virtualization ensures isolation between subsystems with different criticality levels. MDE is intended to bridge the gap between design issues and partitioning concerns. MDE tooling will enhance the functional models by annotating partitioning and extra-functional properties. System partitioning and subsystems allocation will be generated with a high degree of automation. System configuration will be validated for ensuring that the resources assigned to a partition are sufficient for executing the allocated software components and that time requirements are met

Detecting Hardware-assisted Hypervisor Rootkits within Nested Virtualized Environments

Virtual machine introspection (VMI) is intended to provide a secure and trusted platform from which forensic information can be gathered about the true behavior of malware within a guest. However, it is possible for malware to escape a guest into the host and for hypervisor rootkits, such as BluePill, to stealthily transition a native OS into a virtualized environment. This research examines the effectiveness of selected detection mechanisms against hardware-assisted virtualization rootkits (HAV-R) within a nested virtualized environment. It presents the design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation of a hypervisor rootkit detection system which exploits both processor and translation lookaside buffer-based mechanisms to detect hypervisor rootkits within a variety of nested virtualized systems. It evaluates the effects of different types of virtualization on hypervisor rootkit detection and explores the effectiveness in-guest HAV-R obfuscation efforts. The results provide convincing evidence that the HAV-Rs are detectable in all SVMI scenarios examined, regardless of HAV-R or virtualization type. Also, that the selected detection techniques are effective at detection of HAV-R within nested virtualized environments, and that the type of virtualization implemented in a VMI system has minimal to no effect on HAV-R detection. Finally, it is determined that in-guest obfuscation does not successfully obfuscate the existence of HAV-R

TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art

There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms