NoHype: virtualized cloud infrastructure without the virtualization
Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Breaking up is hard to do: security and functionality in a commodity hypervisor
SOSP '11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
Eliminating the hypervisor attack surface for a more secure cloud
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Robust and flexible tunnel management for secure private cloud
ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review
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Cloud computing leverages virtualization to offer resources on demand to multiple "tenants". However, sharing the server and network infrastructure creates new vulnerabilities, where one tenant can attack another by compromising the underlying hypervisor. We design a system that supports virtualized networking using software switches without a hypervisor. In our architecture, the software switch runs in a Switch Domain (DomS) that is separate from the control VM. Both the guest VMs and DomS run directly on the server hardware, with processing and memory resources allocated in advance. Each guest VM interacts with the software switch through a shared memory region using periodic polling to detect network packets. The communication does not involve the hypervisor or the control VM. In addition, any software bugs that crash the software switch do not crash the rest of the system, and a crashed switch can be easily rebooted. Experiments with our initial prototype, built using Xen and Open vSwitch, show that the combination of shared pages and polling offers reasonable performance compared to conventional hypervisor-based solutions.