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CFCC: A Covert Flows Confinement Mechanism for Virtual Machine Coalitions

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Systems and Virtualization Management. Standards and the Cloud (SVM 2009)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 71))

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Abstract

Normally, virtualization technology is adopted to construct the infrastructure of cloud computing environment. Resources are managed and organized dynamically through virtual machine (VM) coalitions in accordance with the requirements of applications. Enforcing mandatory access control (MAC) on the VM coalitions will greatly improve the security of VM-based cloud computing. However, the existing MAC models lack the mechanism to confine the covert flows and are hard to eliminate the convert channels. In this paper, we propose a covert flows confinement mechanism for virtual machine coalitions (CFCC), which introduces dynamic conflicts of interest based on the activity history of VMs, each of which is attached with a label. The proposed mechanism can be used to confine the covert flows between VMs in different coalitions. We implement a prototype system, evaluate its performance, and show that our mechanism is practical.

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Cheng, G., Jin, H., Zou, D., Shi, L., Ohoussou, A.K. (2010). CFCC: A Covert Flows Confinement Mechanism for Virtual Machine Coalitions. In: Boursas, L., Carlson, M., Jin, H., Sibilla, M., Wold, K. (eds) Systems and Virtualization Management. Standards and the Cloud. SVM 2009. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 71. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14944-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14944-3_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14943-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14944-3

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