Skip to main content

Trusted VM Snapshots in Untrusted Cloud Infrastructures

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7462))

Abstract

A cloud customer’s inability to verifiably trust an infrastructure provider with the security of its data inhibits adoption of cloud computing. Customers could establish trust with secure runtime integrity measurements of their virtual machines (VMs). The runtime state of a VM, captured via a snapshot, is used for integrity measurement, migration, malware detection, correctness validation, and other purposes. However, commodity virtualized environments operate the snapshot service from a privileged VM. In public cloud environments, a compromised privileged VM or its potentially malicious administrators can easily subvert the integrity of a customer VMs snapshot. To this end, we present HyperShot, a hypervisor-based system that captures VM snapshots whose integrity cannot be compromised by a rogue privileged VM or its administrators. HyperShot additionally generates trusted snapshots of the privileged VM itself, thus contributing to the increased security and trustworthiness of the entire cloud infrastructure.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Azab, A.M., Ning, P., Wang, Z., Jiang, X., Zhang, X., Skalsky, N.C.: Hypersentry: Enabling stealthy in-context measurement of hypervisor integrity. In: ACM CCS, Chicago (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Balding, C.: What everyone ought to know about cloud security, http://www.slideshare.net/craigbalding/what-everyone-ought-to-know-about-cloud-security (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  3. Baliga, A., Ganapathy, V., Iftode, L.: Automatic inference and enforcement of kernel data structures invariants. In: Proc. of ACSAC, Anaheim, CA (December 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Xen and the art of virtualization. In: ACM SOSP, NY (October 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Carbone, M., Cui, W., Lu, L., Lee, W., Peinado, M., Jiang, X.: Mapping Kernel Objects to Enable Systematic Integrity Checking. In: ACM CCS, Chicago, IL (November 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Christodorescu, M., Sailer, R., Schales, D., Sgandurra, D., Zamboni, D.: Cloud Security Is Not (Just) Virtualization Security. In: Proc. of CCSW, Chicago, IL (November 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cihula, J.: Trusted Boot: Verifying the Xen Launch, http://xen.org/files/xensummit_fall07/23_JosephCihula.pdf (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  8. Clark, C., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Hansen, J.G., Jul, E., Limpach, C., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Live Migration of Virtual Machines. In: Proc. of USENIX NSDI, Boston, MA (May 2005)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Colp, P., Matthews, C., Aiello, B., Warfield, A.: VM Snapshots, http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_oracle09/VMSnapshots.pdf (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  10. Feldman, A.J., Zeller, W.P., Freedman, M.J., Felten, E.W.: SPORC: Group Collaboration using Untrusted Cloud Resources. In: Proc. of OSDI, Vancouver, Canada (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Garfinkel, T., Pfaff, B., Chow, J., Rosenblum, M., Boneh, D.: Terra: A virtual machine-based platform for trusted computing. In: Proc. of ACM SOSP, NY (October 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Garfinkel, T., Rosenblum, M.: A Virtual Machine Introspection Based Architecture for Intrusion Detection. In: Proc. of NDSS, San Diego, CA (February 2003)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Goldman, K.A., Perez, R., Sailer, R.: Linking remote attestation to secure tunnel endpoints. In: ACM STC, Alexandria, VA (October 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Haeberlen, A.: A case for the accountable cloud. In: Proc. of LADIS, Big Sky, MT (October 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Intel. Intel Trusted Execution Technology, http://www.intel.com/technology/security/ (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  16. Intel. Intel Virtualization Technology: Hardware support for efficient processor virtualization, http://download.intel.com/technology/itj/2006/v10i3/v10-i3-art01.pdf (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  17. King, S.T., Chen, P.M., Wang, Y.-M., Verbowski, C., Wang, H.J., Lorch, J.R.: SubVirt: Implementing Malware with Virtual Machines. In: IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, Oakland, CA (May 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Krautheim, F.J.: Private Virtual Infrastructure for Cloud Computing. In: Proc. of HotCloud, San Diego, CA (June 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Mahajan, P., Setty, S., Lee, S., Clement, A., Alvisi, L., Dahlin, M., Walfish, M.: Depot: Cloud Storage with Minimal Trust. In: Proc. of OSDI, Vancouver, Canada (October 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  20. McCune, J.M., Li, Y., Qu, N., Zhou, Z., Datta, A., Gligor, V., Perrig, A.: TrustVisor: Efficient TCB reduction and attestation. In: IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, CA (May 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. McCune, J.M., Parno, B., Perrig, A., Reiter, M.K., Isozaki, H.: Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization. In: Proc. of ACM EuroSys, Glasgow, UK (March 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Merkle, R.C.: A Digital Signature Based on a Conventional Encryption Function. In: Pomerance, C. (ed.) CRYPTO 1987. LNCS, vol. 293, pp. 369–378. Springer, Heidelberg (1988)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Meyer, D.T., Aggarwal, G., Cully, B., Lefebvre, G., Feeley, M.J., Hutchinson, N.C., Warfield, A.: Parallax: Virtual Disks for Virtual Machines. In: Proc. of ACM Eurosys, Scotland (March 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Microsoft. Hyper-V Architecture, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768520BTS.10.aspx (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  25. Molnar, D., Schechter, S.: Self Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting: Accounting for the security impact of hosting in the cloud. In: Proc. of WEIS, Boston, MA (June 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Murray, D.G., Milos, G., Hand, S.: Improving Xen security through disaggregation. In: Proc. of ACM VEE, Seattle, WA (March 2008)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Open TC. OpenTC PKI: AIK Certificate Creation Cycle, http://opentc.iaik.tugraz.at/index.php?item=pca/pca_aik_create (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  28. Parno, B., McCune, J., Perrig, A.: Bootstrapping Trust in Commodity Computers. In: Proc. of IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, Oakland, CA (May 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Passmark Software. PassMark Performance Test, http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  30. Potter, S., Bellovin, S.M., Nieh, J.: Two-person control administration: Preventing administation faults through duplication. In: Proc. of LISA, Baltimore, MD (November 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Ristenpart, T., Tromer, E., Shacham, H., Savage, S.: Hey, you, get off of my cloud! Exploring information leakage in third-party compute clouds. In: ACM CCS, Chicago (November 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Rutkowska, J.: Subverting Vista kernel for fun and profit. In: Black Hat USA (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Sailer, R., Zhang, X., Jaeger, T., van Doorn, L.: Design and implementation of a TCG-based integrity measurement architecture. In: Usenix Security, San Diego, CA (August 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Santos, N., Gummadi, K.P., Rodrigues, R.: Towards trusted cloud computing. In: HotCloud, San Diego, CA (June 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Schiffman, J., Moyer, T., Vijayakumar, H., Jaeger, T., McDaniel, P.: Seeding clouds with trust anchors. In: Proc. of CCSW, Chicago, IL, (Novemer 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Seshadri, A., Luk, M., Qu, N., Perrig, A.: SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes. In: Proc. of ACM SOSP, WA (October 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Steinberg, U., Kauer, B.: NOVA: A Microhypervisor-Based Secure Virtualization Architecture. In: Proc. of ACM Eurosys, Paris, France (April 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Trusted Computing Group. TPM Specification version 1.2, Parts 1, 2, & 3, http://www.trustedcomputing.org (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  39. VMware. Debugging Virtual Machines with the Checkpoint to Core Tool, http://www.vmware.com/pdf/snapshot2core_technote.pdf (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  40. VMware. The Architecture of VMware ESXi, http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware_esxi_architecture_wp.pdf (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  41. VMware. Virtualization Software, http://www.vmware.com (last accessed April 08, 2012)

  42. Volatility. The Volatility framework: Volatile memory artifact extraction utility framework, https://www.volatilesystems.com/default/volatility (last accessed April 08, 2012)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Srivastava, A., Raj, H., Giffin, J., England, P. (2012). Trusted VM Snapshots in Untrusted Cloud Infrastructures. In: Balzarotti, D., Stolfo, S.J., Cova, M. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses. RAID 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7462. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33338-5_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33338-5_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33337-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33338-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics