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Taming Hosted Hypervisors with (Mostly) Deprivileged Execution
| Content Provider | CiteSeerX |
|---|---|
| Author | Wu, Chiachih Wang, Zhi Jiang, Xuxian |
| Abstract | Recent years have witnessed increased adoption of hosted hypervisors in virtualized computer systems. By non-intrusively extending commodity OSs, hosted hypervi-sors can effectively take advantage of a variety of mature and stable features as well as the existing broad user base of commodity OSs. However, virtualizing a computer system is still a rather complex task. As a result, existing hosted hypervisors typically have a large code base (e.g., 33.6K SLOC for KVM), which inevitably introduces exploitable software bugs. Unfortunately, any compromised hosted hy-pervisor can immediately jeopardize the host system and subsequently affect all running guests in the same physical machine. In this paper, we present a system that aims to dramati-cally reduce the exposed attack surface of a hosted hypervi-sor by deprivileging its execution to user mode. In essence, by decoupling the hypervisor code from the host OS and deprivileging its execution, our system demotes the hyper-visor mostly as a user-level library, which not only substan-tially reduces the attack surface (with a much smaller TCB), but also brings additional benefits in allowing for better de-velopment and debugging as well as concurrent execution of multiple hypervisors in the same physical machine. To evaluate its effectiveness, we have developed a proof-of-concept prototype that successfully deprivileges ∼ 93.2% of the loadable KVM module code base in user mode while only adding a small TCB (2.3K SLOC) to the host OS ker-nel. Additional evaluation results with a number of bench-mark programs further demonstrate its practicality and ef-ficiency. 1 |
| File Format | |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Commodity Os Physical Machine Exploitable Software Bug Large Code Base Hosted Hypervisors Host O User-level Library Complex Task Proof-of-concept Prototype Bench-mark Program Attack Surface Virtualized Computer System Computer System Hypervisor Code Small Tcb Host O Ker-nel Stable Feature Host System Loadable Kvm Module Code Base Additional Evaluation Result Exposed Attack Surface Broad User Base Additional Benefit User Mode Concurrent Execution Multiple Hypervisors |
| Content Type | Text |
