Wednesday, 18 October 2017

Development of Secure Intersystem Communication Mechanisms inside of a Type-1 Hypervisor

Development of Secure Intersystem Communication Mechanisms inside of a Type-1 Hypervisor


The goal: to develop new techniques of efficient and secure utilization of shared resources in heterogeneous environment with multiple operating systems via usage of new intersystem communication mechanisms inside of a type-1 hypervisor.

Problem to solve: in the modern world one can observe that diversity of computer technologies is increasing. On the one hand, there are a lot of modern hardware components like GPUs and DSPs. On the other hand, the amount of software is also increasing. Thus, the question arises - how to utilize the modern hardware simultaneously with diversity of created software (modern and legacy). Another interesting question is how to make these systems communicate efficiently.
There are several points to keep in mind:
  • communication should not be cumbersome
  • communication should be predictable
  • resource sharing should be fair
  • resources should be shared following a security policy
  • security policies should be verifiable.
So, basically the problem can be formulated in the question - how to share resources between several operating systems on a predictable basis following the established security policy for each system/application?

Objectives:
There are two main objectives:
  • a common security policy for all applications/systems
  • a "responsive" resource sharing - the delay during resource usage by any guest system shouldn't lead to considerable lags in systems' behavior.
Proposed solution: the solution for the given problem is based on a usage of Xen hypervisor with a new intersystem communication real-time mechanism and integration of dom0 security policy mechanism like SELinux into hypervisor.


Where it can be useful: embedded systems (see ARINC653), utilization of legacy software in a modern environment in embedded systems, simultaneous utilization of several operating systems in smartphones, e.g. GNU/Linux based+Android.

Literature:

No comments:

Post a Comment