Biblio

As Meltdown mitigation, Kernel Page Table I solation (KPTI) was merged into Linux kernel mainline, and the performance impact is significant on x86 processors. Most of the previous work focuses on how KPTI affects Linux kernel performance within the scope of virtual machines or physical machines on x86. However, whether host KPTI affects virtual machines has not been well studied. What's more, there is relatively little research on ARM CPUs. This paper presents an in-depth study of how KPTI on the host affects the virtualized server performance and compares ARMv8 and x86. We first run several application benchmarks to demonstrate the performance impact does exist. The reason is that with a para-virtual I/O scheme, guest offloads I/O requests to the host side, which may incur user/kernel transitions. For the network I/O, when using QEMU as the back-end device, we saw a 1.7% and 5.5% slowdown on ARMv8 and x86, respectively. vhost and vhost-user, originally proposed to optimize performance, inadvertently mitigate the performance impact introduced by host KPTI. For CPU and memory-intensive benchmarks, the performance impact is trivial. We also find that virtual machines on ARMv8 are less affected by KPTI. To diagnose the root cause, we port HyperBench to the ARM virtualization platform. The final results show that swapping the translation table pointer register on ARMv8 is about 3.5x faster than x86. Our findings have significant implications for tuning the x86 virtualization platform's performance and helping ARMv8 administrators enable KPTI with confidence.

With the development of cloud computing, remote attestation of virtual machines has received extensive attention. However, the current schemes mainly concentrate on the single prover, and the attestation of a large-scale virtualization environment will cause TPM bottleneck and network congestion, resulting in low efficiency of attestation. This paper proposes CloudTA, an extensible remote attestation architecture. CloudTA groups all virtual machines on each cloud server and introduces an integrity measurement group (IMG) to measure virtual machines and generate trusted evidence by a group. Subsequently, the cloud server reports the physical platform and VM group's trusted evidence for group verification, reducing latency and improving efficiency. Besides, CloudTA designs a hybrid high concurrency communication framework for supporting remote attestation of large-scale virtual machines by combining active requests and periodic reports. The evaluation results suggest that CloudTA has good efficiency and scalability and can support remote attestation of ten thousand virtual machines.

The widespread adoption of DEP has made most modern attacks follow the same general steps: Attackers try to construct code-reuse attacks by using vulnerable indirect branch instructions in shared objects after successful exploits on memory vulnerabilities. In response to code-reuse attacks, researchers have proposed a large number of defenses. However, most of them require access to source code and/or specific hardware features. These limitations hinder the deployment of these defenses much.In this paper, we propose an address-based code-reuse attack mitigation for shared objects at the binary-level. We emphasize that the execution of indirect branch instruction must follow several principles we propose. More specifically, we first reconstruct function boundaries at the program’s dynamic-linking stage by combining shared object’s dynamic symbols with binary-level instruction analysis. We then leverage static instrumentation to hook vulnerable indirect branch instructions to a novel target address computation and validation routine. At runtime, AddrArmor will protect against code-reuse attacks based on the computed target address.Our experimental results show that AddrArmor provides a strong line of defense against code reuse attacks, and has an acceptable performance overhead of about 6.74% on average using SPEC CPU 2006.

In this work, an IF(intermediate frequency) module of a hyperspectral microwave radiometer based on a polyphase filter bank (PFB) and Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT)is introduced. The IF module is designed with an 800MSPS sampling-rate ADC and a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The module can achieve 512 channels and a bandwidth of 400M and process all the sampled data in real-time. The test results of this module are given and analyzed, such as linearity, accuracy, etc. It can be used in various applications of microwave remote sensing. The system has strong expandability.

Due to the computing capability limitation of the Internet of things devices in the perception layer, the traditional security solutions are difficult to be used directly. How to design a new lightweight, secure and reliable protocol suitable for the Internet of Things application environment, and realize the secure transmission of information among many sensing checkpoints is an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we propose a decentralized lightweight authentication key protocol based on the combination of public key and trusted computing technology, which is used to establish secure communication between nodes in the perception layer. The various attacks that the protocol may suffer are analyzed, and the formal analysis method is used to verify the security of the protocol. To verify the validity of the protocol, the computation and communication cost of the protocol are compared with the existing key protocols. And the results show that the protocol achieved the promised performance.

In monolithic operating system (OS), any error of system software can be exploit to destroy the whole system. The situation becomes much more severe in cloud environment, when the kernel and the hypervisor share the same address space. The security of guest Virtual Machines (VMs), both sensitive data and vital code, can no longer be guaranteed, once the hypervisor is compromised. Therefore, it is essential to deploy some security approaches to secure VMs, regardless of the hypervisor is safe or not. Some approaches propose microhypervisor reducing attack surface, or a new software requiring a higher privilege level than hypervisor. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named HyperPS, which separates the fundamental and crucial privilege into a new trusted environment in order to monitor hypervisor. A pivotal condition for HyperPS is that hypervisor must not be allowed to manipulate any security-sensitive system resources, such as page tables, system control registers, interaction between VM and hypervisor as well as VM memory mapping. Besides, HyperPS proposes a trusted environment which does not rely on any higher privilege than the hypervisor. We have implemented a prototype for KVM hypervisor on x86 platform with multiple VMs running Linux. KVM with HyperPS can be applied to current commercial cloud computing industry with portability. The security analysis shows that this approach can provide effective monitoring against attacks, and the performance evaluation confirms the efficiency of HyperPS.