Dynamic reliability and security monitoring: a virtual machine approach

Estrada, Zachary

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/95458 Copy

Description

Title

Dynamic reliability and security monitoring: a virtual machine approach

Author(s)

Estrada, Zachary

Issue Date

2016-10-17

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

• Iyer, Ravishankar K.
• Kalbarczyk, Zbigniew T.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Iyer, Ravishankar K.

Committee Member(s)

• Bailey, Michael D
• Campbell, Roy H.
• Hwu, Wen-Mei W.

Department of Study

Electrical & Computer Eng

Discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• virtualization
• emulation
• security
• reliability
• hprobes
• cloud
• hardware-asssisted virtualization
• dynamic analysis

Abstract

While one always works to prevent attacks and failures, they are inevitable and situational awareness is key to taking appropriate action. Monitoring plays an integral role in ensuring reliability and security of computing systems. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds significantly lower the barrier for obtaining scalable computing resources and allow users to focus on what is important to them. Can a similar service be offered to provide on-demand reliability and security monitoring? Cloud computing systems are typically built using virtual machines (VMs). VM monitoring takes advantage of this and uses the hypervisor that runs VMs for robust reliability and security monitoring. The hypervisor provides an environment that is isolated from failures and attacks inside customers’ VMs. Furthermore, as a low-level manager of computing resources, the hypervisor has full access to the infrastructure running above it. Hypervisor-based VM monitoring leverages that information to observe the VMs for failures and attacks. However, existing VM monitoring techniques fall short of “as-a-service” expectations because they require a priori VM modifications and require human interaction to obtain necessary information about the underlying guest system. The research presented in this dissertation closes those gaps by providing a flexible VM monitoring framework and automated analysis to support that framework. We have developed and tested a dynamic VM monitoring framework called Hypervisor Probes (hprobes). The hprobe framework allows us to monitor the execution of both the guest OS and applications from the hypervisor. To supplement this monitoring framework, we use dynamic analysis techniques to investigate the relationship between hardware events visible to the hyper-visor and OS constructs common across OS versions. We use the results of this analysis to parametrize the hprobe-based monitors without requiring any user input. Combining the dynamic VM monitoring framework and analysis frameworks allows us to provide on-demand hypervisor based monitors for cloud VMs.

Graduation Semester

2016-12

Type of Resource

text

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Zachary J Estrada

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