Secure Communication Mechanism in Xen Hypervisor

Abstract

In virtualization architectures, a small trusted computing base (TCB) minimizes the attacks which could be dangerous the security of the entire system. The TCB for an application includes the hardware, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) and the whole management operating system (OS). The management OS contains not only the device drivers but also virtual machine (VM) management functionality. This management OS is not acceptable to trust for many applications due to its high privilege level. In this paper, the secure virtual machine execution mechanism under the assumption of untrusted management OS (Dom0 in Xen) is proposed. This mechanism provides the confidentiality and integrity of the guest VM (DomUs in Xen). A secure communication channel is also proposed to exchange the secure information between Dom0 and the DomUs by authenticating and avoiding replay attacks.