5799803
Protection mechanisms for application service hosting platforms
The application service hosting platform (ASHP) has recently received tremendous attention from both industry and academia. An ASHP provides a shared high-performance infrastructure to host different application services (AS), outsourced by application service providers (ASP). In this paper, we focus on the protection of ASHP which has inherent requirement of sharing, openness, and mutual isolation. In contrast to a dedicated server platform, which is analogous with a private house, an ASHP is like an apartment building, involving the 'host' - the ASHP infrastructure, and the 'tenants' - the AS. Strong protection and isolation must be provided between the host and the tenants, as well as between different tenants. Unfortunately, traditional OS architecture and mechanisms are not adequate to provide strong ASHP protection. In this paper we first make the case for a new OS architecture based on the virtual OS technology. We then present three protection mechanisms we have developed in SODA, our ASHP architecture. The mechanisms include: (1) resource isolation between AS; (2) virtual switching and firewalling between AS; and (3) kernelized intrusion detection and logging for each AS. For (3), we have developed a system called Kernort inside the virtual OS kernel. Kernort detects network intrusions in real-time and logs AS activities even when the AS has been compromised. Moreover for the privacy of AS, logs are encrypted by Kernort so that the 'landlord' (namely ASHP owner) cannot view them without authorization. We are applying SODA to iShare, an Internet-based distributed resource sharing platform.
6781814
"Out-of-the-Box" Monitoring of VM-Based High-Interaction Honeypots
Honeypot has been an invaluable tool for the detection and analysis of network-based attacks by either human intruders or automated malware in the wild. The insights obtained by deploying honeypots, especially high-interaction ones, largely rely on the monitoring capability on the honeypots. In practice, based on the location of sensors, honeypots can be monitored either internally or externally. Being deployed inside the monitored honeypots, internal sensors are able to provide a semantic-rich view on various aspects of system dynamics (e.g., system calls). However, their very internal existence makes them visible, tangible, and even subvertible to attackers after break-ins. From another perspective, existing external honeypot sensors (e.g., network sniffers) could be made invisible to the monitored honeypot. However, they are not able to capture any internal system events such as system calls executed. 
 
It is desirable to have a honeypot monitoring system that is invisible, tamper-resistant and yet is capable of recording and understanding the honeypot's system internal events such as system calls. In this paper, we present a virtualization-based system called VMscope which allows us to view the system internal events of virtual machine (VM)-based honeypots from outside the honeypots. Particularly, by observing and interpreting VM-internal system call events at the virtual machine monitor (VMM) layer, VMscope is able to provide the same deep inspection capability as that of traditional inside-the-honeypot monitoring tools (e.g., Sebek) while still obtaining similar tamper-resistance and invisibility as other external monitoring tools. We have built a proof-of-concept prototype by leveraging and extending one key virtualization technique called binary translation. Our experiments with real-world honeypots show that VMscope is robust against advanced countermeasures that can defeat existing internally-deployed honeypot monitors, and it only incurs moderate run-time overhead.
7279689
An Architectural Approach to Preventing Code Injection Attacks
Code injection attacks, despite being well researched, continue to be a problem today. Modern architectural solutions such as the execute-disable bit and PaX have been useful in limiting the attacks; however, they enforce program layout restrictions and can oftentimes still be circumvented by a determined attacker. We propose a change to the memory architecture of modern processors that addresses the code injection problem at its very root by virtually splitting memory into code memory and data memory such that a processor will never be able to fetch injected code for execution. This virtual split memory system can be implemented as a software-only patch to an operating system and can be used to supplement existing schemes for improved protection. Furthermore, our system is able to accommodate a number of response modes when a code injection attack occurs. Our experiments with both benchmarks and real-world attacks show the system is effective in preventing a wide range of code injection attacks while incurring reasonable overhead.
18153606
Virtual distributed environments in a shared infrastructure
We have developed a middleware system that integrates and extends virtual machine and virtual network technologies to support mutually isolated virtual distributed environments in shared infrastructures like the grid and the PlanetLab overlay infrastructure. Integrating virtual network and on-demand virtual machine creation and customization technologies makes virtual distributed environments a reality. The Violin-based middleware system integrates and enhances such technologies to create virtual distributed environments.
325582
Virtual Playgrounds for Worm Behavior Investigation
To detect and defend against Internet worms, researchers have long hoped to have a safe convenient environment to unleash and run real-world worms for close observation of their infection, damage, and propagation. However, major challenges exist in realizing such “worm playgrounds”, including the playgrounds' fidelity, confinement, scalability, as well as convenience in worm experiments. In this paper, we present a virtualization-based platform to create virtual worm playgrounds, called vGrounds, on top of a physical infrastructure. A vGround is an all-software virtual environment dynamically created for a worm attack. It has realistic end-hosts and network entities, all realized as virtual machines (VMs) and confined in a virtual network (VN). The salient features of vGround include: (1) high fidelity supporting real worm codes exploiting real vulnerable services, (2) strict confinement making the real Internet totally invisible and unreachable from inside a vGround, (3) high resource efficiency achieving sufficiently large scale of worm experiments, and (4) flexible and efficient worm experiment control enabling fast (tens of seconds) and automatic generation, re-installation, and final tear-down of vGrounds. Our experiments with real-world worms (including multi-vector worms and polymorphic worms) have successfully exhibited their probing and propagation patterns, exploitation steps, and malicious payloads, demonstrating the value of vGrounds for worm detection and defense research.
15335137
Automated Web Patrol with Strider HoneyMonkeys: Finding Web Sites That Exploit Browser Vulnerabilities
Internet attacks that use malicious web sites to install malware programs by exploiting browser vulnerabilities are a serious emerging threat. In response, we have developed an automated web patrol system to automatically identify and monitor these malicious sites. We describe the design and implementation of the Strider HoneyMonkey Exploit Detection System, which consists of a pipeline of “monkey programs” running possibly vulnerable browsers on virtual machines with different patch levels and patrolling the Web to seek out and classify web sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities. Within the first month of utilizing this system, we identified 752 unique URLs hosted on 288 web sites that could successfully exploit unpatched Windows XP machines. The system automatically constructed topology graphs based on traffic redirection to capture the relationship between the exploit sites. This allowed us to identify several major players who are responsible for a large number of exploit pages. By monitoring these 752 exploit-URLs on a daily basis, we discovered a malicious web site that was performing zero-day exploits of the unpatched javaprxy.dll vulnerability and was operating behind 25 exploit-URLs. It was confirmed as the first “inthe-wild”, zero-day exploit of this vulnerability that was reported to the Microsoft Security Response Center. Additionally, by scanning the most popular one million URLs as classified by a search engine, we found over seven hundred exploit-URLs, many of which serve popular content related to celebrities, song lyrics, wallpapers, video game cheats, and wrestling.
858944
Ubiquitous computing for firefighters: field studies and prototypes of large displays for incident command
In this paper, we demonstrate how field studies, interviews, and low-fidelity prototypes can be used to inform the design of ubiquitous computing systems for firefighters. We describe the artifacts and processes used by firefighters to assess, plan, and communicate during emergency situations, showing how accountability affects these decisions, how their current Incident Command System supports these tasks, and some drawbacks of existing solutions. These factors informed the design of a large electronic display for supporting the incident commander, the person who coordinates the overall response strategy in an emergency. Although our focus was on firefighters, our results are applicable for other aspects of emergency response as well, due to common procedures and training.
30106346
A Genetic Algorithm for Dynamic Routing and Wavelength Assignment in WDM Networks
In this paper, we study the challenging problem of Dynamic Routing and Wavelength Assignment (DRWA) in WDM (Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing) networks with wavelength continuity constraint, and propose an improved genetic algorithm (GA) for it. By adopting a new fitness function to consider simultaneously the path length and number of free wavelengths in cost estimation of a route, the new genetic RWA algorithm can achieve a good load balance among route candidates and result in a lower blocking probability than both the fixed alternative routing algorithm and the previous GA-based algorithm for DRWA, as verified by an extensive simulation study upon the ns-2 network simulator and some typical network topologies.
12509330
Approximate Information Flows: Socially-Based Modeling of Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing
In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting sociallycompatible privacy objectives in ubiquitous computing settings. Drawing on social science research, we have developed a key objective called the Principle of Minimum Asymmetry, which seeks to minimize the imbalance between the people about whom data is being collected, and the systems and people that collect and use that data. We have also developed Approximate Information Flow (AIF), a model describing the interaction between the various actors and personal data. AIF effectively supports varying degrees of asymmetry for ubicomp systems, suggests new privacy protection mechanisms, and provides a foundation for inspecting privacy-friendliness of ubicomp systems.
7558919
Siren: Context-aware Computing for Firefighting
Based on an extensive field study of current firefighting practices, we have developed a system called Siren to support tacit communication between firefighters with multiple levels of redundancy in both communication and user alerts. Siren provides a foundation for gathering, integrating, and distributing contextual data, such as location and temperature. It also simplifies the development of firefighting applications using a peer-to-peer network of embedded devices through a uniform programming interface based on the information space abstraction. As a proof of concept, we have developed a prototype context-aware messaging application in the firefighting domain. We have evaluated this application with firefighters and they have found it to be useful for improving many aspects of their current work practices.
38206015
A Scalable HLA-Based Distributed Simulation Framework for VR Application
HLA-based Distributed Simulation technology is employed widely in Virtual Reality (VR) applications, such as military simulation, internet games, roaming etc. To support larger number of participants, scalability is becoming a key issue of VR applications. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of distributed simulation, and analyze the scalability of servers and participants, and classify our approach to improve scalability of VR applications into three aspects: a three-tier node management mode to accommodate more participants, an efficient management of servers to manage scalable number of clients and software development interface to achieve reusability and interoperability of VR applications. We present our middleware platform, HIVE, providing a scalable HLA-based distributed simulation framework for VR applications, on which users can develop VR applications easily and quickly. Then we give the method and view of application integration with HIVE. Finally an experimental demo is given.