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Architecture Support for Controllable VMI on Untrusted Cloud

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Abstract

This paper combines architecture isolation with latest Intel SGX technology to make a controllable virtual machine introspection architecture on untrusted cloud. The main goal of SGX is to protect important applications from being attacked by untrusted OS, while the main goal of VMI is to protect OS from being attacked by untrusted applications. So it seems like contradictory, but actually they are complementary. By combining SGX and VMI, we can both monitoring the behavior of untrusted applications and preventing sensitive applications from being monitored. This is very practical in public cloud, as the cloud server provider is untrusted, but we still rely on its resource to provide computing. As far as we know, this is the first proposal to implement security monitor in an untrusted cloud with the help of trusted hardware. Preliminary security analysis and performance evaluation show that our architecture can ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the VM hosted on untrusted cloud server while providing VMI services with less than 20% overhead.

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Correspondence to Jiangyong Shi .

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© 2017 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Shi, J., Yang, Y. (2017). Architecture Support for Controllable VMI on Untrusted Cloud. In: Deng, R., Weng, J., Ren, K., Yegneswaran, V. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 198. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59607-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-59608-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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