General Virtual Hosting via Lightweight User-Level Virtualization

Authors:
Peter Suranyi;Hirotake Abe;Toshio Hirotsu;Yasushi Shinjo;Kazuhiko Kato
Affiliations:
University of Tsukuba, Japan;CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST);Toyashi University of Technology, Japan & JST CREST;University of Tsukuba, Japan & JST CREST;University of Tsukuba, Japan & JST CREST
Venue:
SAINT '05 Proceedings of the The 2005 Symposium on Applications and the Internet
Year:
2005

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A low-cost runtime-privilege changing system for shared servers

ICACT'10 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Advanced communication technology

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Abstract

The abundance of computing resources in current systems makes it technically feasible to run services for multiple Internet sites on a single machine. However, in the UNIX security model, a vast majority of services must be run with superuser privileges. This increases security risks considerably when numerous services are running in parallel, making the isolation of services a critical issue. Virtual hosting systems have been implemented at the application level and at the operating system (OS) level and by running services in isolated full-scale virtual machines. We present a middleware approach to general virtual hosting that does not require modifications to the OS or the application. While completely implementable in the user-level in UNIX-like OSes, our system allows secure deployment of services, even when they are executed with superuser privileges.