Multipersona Hypovisors: Securing Mobile Devices through High-Performance Light-Weight Subsystem Isolation
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Authors
Krishnan, Neelima
Hitefield, Seth
Clancy, T. Charles
McGwier, Robert W.
Tront, Joseph G.
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2013-06-28
Date
Publisher
Virginia Tech
Language
en_US
Abstract
We propose and detail a system called multipersona Hypovisors for providing light-weight isolation for enhancing security on Multipersona mobile devices, particularly with respect to the current memory constraints of these devices.
Multipersona Hypovisors leverage Linux kernel cGroups and namespaces to establish independent process container, al-lowing isolation of the Multipersona process tree from other simultaneous instances of Multipersona and the hypovisor which is an underlying Angstrom-based embedded Linux distributions designed to add additional security to the system. The system incorporates a wide range of data integrity tools in the embedded hypovisor, and an SE Linux-enabled kernel for mandatory access control and integrity tools for transparent auditing of running Multipersona instances.
A prototype is presented which uses integrity tools external to the Multipersona container to audit it for malicious activity, and also has the ability to support a multipersona environment with multiple encrypted personas existing individually or simultaneously on the device. Two versions are demonstrated, one which allows cold-swapping of personas for high-assurance scenarios and also one that supports hot-swapping.
Analysis shows that the hypovisor has a 40-50 MB impact on the overall memory footprint for the system.
Type
Article
Description
Funded by Naval Postgraduate School
Series/Report No
Department
Organization
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Naval Postgraduate School under contract N00244-11-P-2026
L-3 Communications National Security Solutions Center
L-3 Communications National Security Solutions Center
Funder
N00244-11-P-2026
Format
9 p.
Citation
Krishan, Neelima, et al. Multipersona Hypovisors: Securing Mobile Devices through High-Performance Light-Weight Subsystem Isolation. Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2013.
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.