Selective Versioning in a Secure Disk System

Making vital disk data recoverable even in the event of OS compromises has become a necessity, in view of the increased prevalence of OS vulnerability exploits over the recent years. We present the design and implementation of a secure disk system, SVSDS, that performs selective, flexible, and transparent versioning of stored data, at the disk-level. In addition to versioning, SVSDS actively enforces constraints to protect executables and system log files. Most existing versioning solutions that operate at the disk-level are unaware of the higher-level ions of data, and hence are not customizable. We evolve a hybrid solution that combines the advantages of disk-level and file-system--level versioning systems thereby ensuring security, while at the same time allowing flexible policies. We implemented and evaluated a software-level prototype of SVSDS in the Linux kernel and it shows that the space and performance overheads associated with selective versioning at the disk level are minim...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: USS
• Authors: Swaminathan Sundararaman, Gopalan Sivathanu, Erez Zadok
• Keywords: Operating System, Secure Disk System, USS 2008, Versioning, Vital Disk Data