24,347 research outputs found
Hypervisor Integrity Measurement Assistant
An attacker who has gained access to a computer may want to upload or modify configuration files, etc., and run arbitrary programs of his choice. We can severely restrict the power of the attacker by having a white-list of approved file checksums and preventing the kernel from loading loading any file with a bad checksum. The check may be placed in the kernel, but that requires a kernel that is prepared for it. The check may also be placed in a hypervisor which intercepts and prevents the kernel from loading a bad file.
We describe the implementation of and give performance results for two systems. In one the checksumming, or integrity measurement, and decision is performed by the hypervisor instead of the OS. In the other only the final integrity decision is done in the hypervisor. By moving the integrity check out from the VM kernel it becomes harder for the intruder to bypass the check.
We conclude that it is technically possible to put file integrity control into the hypervisor, both for kernels without and with pre-compiled support for integrity measurement
Security, Performance and Energy Trade-offs of Hardware-assisted Memory Protection Mechanisms
The deployment of large-scale distributed systems, e.g., publish-subscribe
platforms, that operate over sensitive data using the infrastructure of public
cloud providers, is nowadays heavily hindered by the surging lack of trust
toward the cloud operators. Although purely software-based solutions exist to
protect the confidentiality of data and the processing itself, such as
homomorphic encryption schemes, their performance is far from being practical
under real-world workloads.
The performance trade-offs of two novel hardware-assisted memory protection
mechanisms, namely AMD SEV and Intel SGX - currently available on the market to
tackle this problem, are described in this practical experience.
Specifically, we implement and evaluate a publish/subscribe use-case and
evaluate the impact of the memory protection mechanisms and the resulting
performance. This paper reports on the experience gained while building this
system, in particular when having to cope with the technical limitations
imposed by SEV and SGX.
Several trade-offs that provide valuable insights in terms of latency,
throughput, processing time and energy requirements are exhibited by means of
micro- and macro-benchmarks.Comment: European Commission Project: LEGaTO - Low Energy Toolset for
Heterogeneous Computing (EC-H2020-780681
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