extending virtualization services with trust guarantees via behavioral monitoring
Today's virtualized platforms enable virtualization services (VSs) that can offer enhanced functionalities to guest virtual machines (VMs) based on behavioral monitoring. One such set of functionality concerns protected service access, by having a VS impose access controls that can be altered and refined at runtime. Changes are made in accordance with the levels of "trust" associated with certain VMs - where VSs use runtime monitoring to derive current "trust" levels from observed guest VM behavior. This paper develops and evaluates implementation methods for trust enhancements of virtualization services and demonstrates their utility for a storage virtualization service, termed protected object store (POS). An implementation of POS based on the PVFS file system as a backend and using the Xen VMM as a virtualization infrastructure is shown effective in its ability to enforce fine-grained, role-based access controls on storage usage based on the VM's dynamic level of "trust", while minimally impacting the overall performance of the storage service.
virtualization services trusted computing dynamic access control