Privacy-preserving Virtual Machine

: Virtual Machines (VMs) have been widely adopted in cloud platforms to improve server consolidation and reduce operating costs. VM checkpointing is used to capture a persistent snapshot of a running VM and to later restore the VM to a previous state. Although VM checkpointing eases system administration, such as in recovering from a VM crash or undoing a previous VM activity, it can also increase the risk of exposing users’ confidential data. This is because the checkpoint may store a VM’s physical memory pages and disk contents that contain confidential data such as clear text passwords and credit card numbers. This paper presents the design and implementation of SPARC, a Security and Privacy AwaRe virtual machine Checkpointing mechanism. SPARC enables users to selectively exclude users’ confidential data within a VM from being checkpointed. We describe the design challenges in effectively tracking and excluding process-specific memory and disk contents from the checkpoint ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Tianlin Li, Yaohui Hu, Ping Yang, Kartik Gopalan
• Keywords: ACSAC 2015, Security Privacy