SecureBus: towards application-transparent trusted computing with mandatory access control

ABSTRACT

The increasing number of software-based attacks has attracted substantial efforts to prevent applications from malicious interference. For example, Trusted Computing (TC) technologies have been recently proposed to provide strong isolation on application platforms. On the other hand, today pervasively available computing cycles and data resources have enabled various distributed applications that require collaboration among different application processes. These two conflicting trends grow in parallel. While much existing research focuses on one of these two aspects, a few authors have considered simultaneously providing strong isolation as well as collaboration convenience, particularly in the TC environment. However, none of these schemes is transparent. That is, they require modifications either of legacy applications or the underlying Operating System (OS).In this paper, we propose the SecureBus (SB) architecture, aiming to provide strong isolation and flexible controlled information flow and communication between processes at runtime. Since SB is application and OS transparent, existing applications can run without changes to commodity OS's. Furthermore, SB enables the enforcement of general access control policies, which is required but difficult to achieve for typical legacy applications. To study its feasibility and performance overhead, we have implemented a prototype system based on User-Mode Linux. Our experimental results show that SB can effectively achieve its design goals.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Access controls

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.5 Security and Protection (D.4.6, K.4.2)
          Subjects: Unauthorized access (e.g., hacking, phreaking)

General Terms:
Management, Security

Keywords:
SecureBus, mandatory access control, secure platform, trusted computing