SecureVirt: a Trusted Computing Base for Virtual Machines

ABSTRACT:In this effort, we develop a light-weight type I hypervisor, called SecureVirt. Compared with existing hypervisors, SecureVirt has a reduced attack surface and small code base, and supports live virtual machine (VM) migration. SecureVirt can securely isolate the virtual machines (VMs) running on the same platform and prevent a malicious VM from escaping its security boundary. The SecureVirt architecture follows the Microkernel design principle and defense in depth strategy, which significantly reduces the attack surface of SecureVirt and meanwhile enables live VM migration. Moreover, SecureVirt adopts a static CPU core and memory allocation approach to further simplify its functions and reduce its code size. We developed a preliminary SecureVirt prototype and conducted extensive experiments to test it in phase I effort. The experimental results in Phase I demonstrate the feasibility of the SecureVirt architecture. In Phase II effort, we will continue our Phase I work by adding more new functions. Specifically, we will implement VM migration support to allow a VM to migrate to different platforms. Finally, the proposed techniques are integrated into a prototype implementation.BENEFIT:The proposed hypervisor architecture, SecureVirt, provides a feasible solution for cloud computing environment. The architecture and techniques can be applied to a broad range of military scenarios that involve sensitive information protection including war-time command and control, real-time surveillance network, homeland security, etc. Other potential commercial applications include software industry, banking, law enforcement agency and various civil applications. In essence, the ideas, methods and products resulting from this effort will be applicable to the applications where trusted computing base is needed. The market is quite large and still developing due to the development of computer and software industry. The aggregated commercial market size is estimated to be $963.4 Million or more.SecureVirt has significant commercial potential for applications such as cloud computing, information security, and trusted computing.End users of SecureVirt include cloud computing infrastructure service providers (Amazon, Rackspace) to protect VMs running on their cloud computing infrastructure; embedded system and mobile device vendors (Northrop Grumman information system, Samsung) to improve the resilience and reliability of their systems; security tool providers such as (Symantec, McAfee, SourceFire) to detect and analyze malware.