SafeHype: a light and secure satellite hypervisor

The virtualization of satellite payload increases the capability and flexibility of the payload developer and is demanded in defense and intelligence community. In this proposed effort, we propose a tiny hypervisor, called SafeHype to virtualize satellite payload. SafeHype can securely isolate the virtual machines concurrently running on the same hardware resources such as CPU, memory and I/O devices. Moreover, SafeHype also supports the provisioning of a new machine on-the -flying. In this proposed effort, we utilize hardware support to reduce virtualization overhead. SafeHype adopt resources pre-allocation and para-virtualized IO techniques to simplify its functions and to support real time applications. The code size of SafeHype is small and can feasibly be verified. SafeHype also reduces the surface attacks by bringing the guest virtual machine in more direct contact with the underlying hardware resources. Finally, we will develop a workable SafeHype prototype to show the feasibility of our proposed techniques for satellite hypervisor.