Dr Priya Chandran

"Virtualization is a vital part of computing today. Rollback is an important feature to be supported by virtualization. However, hackers leverage rollback and pose serious security threats to systems running in a virtualized environment. The aim of this paper is to identify such security threats and propose a comprehensive solution. In this paper, we propose Extended-HyperWall architecture as a solution to security of Virtual Machines (VMs) in a fully virtualized environment. Extended-HyperWall architecture is an integration of HyperWall with Rollback Sensitive Data Memory with Architecture Assistance (RSDM-A). HyperWall is a system that proposes hardware support to ensure confidentiality and integrity of a VM's data, with an assumption that hypervisor cannot be trusted. RSDM-A is an architectural support to a virtualized system that separates rollback sensitive data from rollback non-sensitive data which is one of the major causes of threats that arises due to rollback. Extended-HyperWall integrates CIP-table (Confidentiality and Integrity Table to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data) and RSDM-table (Rollback Sensitive Data Memory to protect the system from rollback attacks). The paper illustrates the design of Extended-HyperWall, and its implementation on the Xen Hypervisor kernel for testing and analysis."

Simulation environments provide a comprehensive set of advantages to users, like cost effectiveness and capability to understand the shortcomings of the system under design, without physical implementation. Simulation platforms help the industry and academia, to document and publish their research outputs in a timely and cost efficient manner. The ECSim tool presented here, is meant for academic use in the initial stages of research. The platform provides an environment where the performance of erasure coded storage systems can be tested without much effort. The main highlight of the simulator is that it provides a very simple environment which can run on a standalone system. The environment does not require the user to be a programmer, since it provides an interactive command line interface to the user. The ability to simulate data center, clusters, master nodes, storage nodes with computing power, storage devices, bandwidth usage and disk I/O involved are notable features of ECSim.