Systems Architecture Commons^™

Fimce: A Fully Isolated Micro-Computing Environment For Multicore Systems, Siqi Zhao, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virtualization-based memory isolation has been widely used as a security primitive in various security systems to counter kernel-level attacks. In this article, our in-depth analysis on this primitive shows that its security is significantly undermined in the multicore setting when other hardware resources for computing are not enclosed within the isolation boundary. We thus propose to construct a fully isolated micro-computing environment (FIMCE) as a new primitive. By virtue of its architectural niche, FIMCE not only offers stronger security assurance than its predecessor, but also features a flexible and composable environment with support for peripheral device isolation, thus greatly expanding …

Hpc Made Easy: Using Docker To Distribute And Test Trilinos, Sean J. Deal

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

Virtualization is an enticing option for computer science research given its ability to provide repeatable, standardized environments, but traditional virtual machines have too much overhead cost to be practical. Docker, a Linux-based tool for operating-system level virtualization, has been quickly gaining popularity throughout the computer science field by touting a virtualization solution that is easily distributable and more lightweight than virtual machines. This thesis aims to explore if Docker is a viable option for conducting virtualized research by evaluating the results of parallel performance tests using the Trilinos project.

Stopwatch: A Cloud Architecture For Timing Channel Mitigation, Peng Li, Debin Gao, Michael K Reiter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article presents StopWatch, a system that defends against timing-based side-channel attacks that arise from coresidency of victims and attackers in infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. StopWatch triplicates each cloud-resident guest virtual machine (VM) and places replicas so that the three replicas of a guest VM are coresident with nonoverlapping sets of (replicas of) other VMs. StopWatch uses the timing of I/O events at a VM’s replicas collectively to determine the timings observed by each one or by an external observer, so that observable timing behaviors are similarly likely in the absence of any other individual, coresident VMs. We detail the design and …

Improving Resource Management In Virtualized Data Centers Using Application Performance Models, Sajib Kundu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of virtualized data centers and cloud hosting services is making the management of physical resources such as CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth in data center servers increasingly important. Server management now involves dealing with multiple dissimilar applications with varying Service-Level-Agreements (SLAs) and multiple resource dimensions. The multiplicity and diversity of resources and applications are rendering administrative tasks more complex and challenging. This thesis aimed to develop a framework and techniques that would help substantially reduce data center management complexity.

We specifically addressed two crucial data center operations. First, we precisely estimated capacity requirements of client virtual machines …

Analyzing The Impact Of A Virtual Machine On A Host Machine, Greg Dorn, Chris Marberry, Scott Conrad, Philip Craiger

Publications

As virtualization becomes more prevalent in the enterprise and in personal computing, there is a great need to understand the technology as well as its ramifications for recovering digital evidence. This paper focuses on trace evidence related to the installation and execution of virtual machines (VMs) on a host machine. It provides useful information regarding the types and locations of files installed by VM applications, the processes created by running VMs and the structure and identity of VMs, ancillary files and associated artifacts.