TrustOSV: Building Trustworthy Executing Environment with Commodity Hardware for a Safe Cloud

Abstract

The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing model is widely used in current IT industry, providing the cloud users virtual machines as the executing environment. However, current executing environment the cloud provided is not trustworthy. For a user's executing environment faces threats from malicious cloud users who aim at attacking the underlying virtualization software (virtual machine monitor, VMM, or hypervisor). In this paper, we first make an analysis of the potential threats to a commodity hypervisor, and then propose architecture to build a more trustworthy executing environment for IaaS cloud. The main ideas of our architecture are: removing interaction between hypervisor and the exposed executing environment, enhancing platform data secrecy as well as providing feature rich environment attestation. To prove the effectiveness of our architecture, we build a prototype system, named TrustOSV, which can host multiple trustworthy isolated computing environments on multi-core x86 hardware. The final evaluation shows that TrustOSV can provide enhanced security guarantees to the exposed VMs at modest cost.