PoliMakE: a policy making engine for secure embedded software execution on chip-multiprocessors
WESS '10 Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Embedded Systems Security
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The popularity of mobile and networked applications has resulted in an increasing demand for execution ``sandboxes''''---environments that impose irrevocable qualitative and quantitative restrictions on resource usage. Existing approaches either verify application compliance to restrictions at start time (e.g., using certified code or language-based protection) or enforce it at run time (e.g., using kernel support, binary modification, or active interception of the application''s interactions with the operating system). However, their general applicability is constrained by the fact that they are either too heavyweight and inflexible, or are limited in the kinds of sandboxing restrictions and applications they can handle. This paper presents a secure user-level sandboxing approach for enforcing both qualitative and quantitative restrictions on resource usage of applications in distributed systems. Our approach actively monitors an application''s interactions with the underlying system, proactively controlling it as desired to enforce the desired behavior. Our approach leverages a core set of user-level mechanisms that are available in most modern operating systems: fine-grained timers, monitoring infrastructure (e.g., the /proc filesystem), debugger processes, priority-based scheduling, and page-based memory protection. We describe implementations of a sandbox that imposes quantitative restrictions on CPU, memory, and network usage on two commodity operating systems: Windows NT and Linux. Our results show that application usage of resources can be restricted to within 3% of desired limits with minimal run-time overhead.