• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.12
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• pp.5375-5400
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• 2016

IOMMU is a hardware unit that is indispensable for DMA. Besides address translation and remapping, it also provides I/O virtual address space isolation among devices and memory access control on DMA transactions. However, currently commodity virtualization platforms lack of IOMMU virtualization, so that the virtual machines are vulnerable to DMA security threats. Previous works focus only on DMA security problem of directly assigned devices. Moreover, these solutions either introduce significant overhead or require modifications on the guest OS to optimize performance, and none can achieve high I/O efficiency and good compatibility with the guest OS simultaneously, which are both necessary for production environments. However, for simulated virtual devices the DMA security problem also exists, and previous works cannot solve this problem. The reason behind that is IOMMU circuits on the host do not work for this kind of devices as DMA operations of which are simulated by memory copy of CPU. Motivated by the above observations, we propose an IOMMU para-virtualization solution called PVIOMMU, which provides general functionalities especially DMA security guarantees for both directly assigned devices and simulated devices. The prototype of PVIOMMU is implemented in Qemu/KVM based on the virtio framework and can be dynamically loaded into guest kernel as a module, As a result, modifying and rebuilding guest kernel are not required. In addition, the device model of Qemu is revised to implement DMA access control by separating the device simulator from the address space of the guest virtual machine. Experimental evaluations on three kinds of network devices including Intel I210 (1Gbps), simulated E1000 (1Gbps) and IB ConnectX-3 (40Gbps) show that, PVIOMMU introduces little overhead on DMA transactions, and in general the network I/O performance is close to that in the native KVM implementation without IOMMU virtualization.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.113-118
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• 2013

The current GPU virtualization techniques incur large overheads when executing application programs mainly due to the fine-grain time-sharing scheduling of the GPU among multiple Virtual Machines (VMs). Besides, the current techniques lack of portability, because they include the APIs for the GPU computations in the VM monitor. In this paper, we propose a low overhead and high performance GPU virtualization approach on a heterogeneous HPC system based on the open-source Xen. Our proposed techniques are tailored to the bio applications. In our virtualization framework, we allow a VM to solely occupy a GPU once the VM is assigned a GPU instead of relying on the time-sharing the GPU. This improves the performance of the applications and the utilization of the GPUs. Our techniques also allow a direct pass-through to the GPU by using the IOMMU virtualization features embedded in the hardware for the high portability. Experimental studies using microbiology genome analysis applications show that our proposed techniques based on the direct pass-through significantly reduce the overheads compared with the previous Domain0 based approaches. Furthermore, our approach closely matches the performance for the applications to the bare machine or rather improves the performance.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2013.11a
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• pp.853-856
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• 2013

최근 클라우드 서비스가 발전함에 따라 향상된 자원 활용과 소프트웨어 이식성을 증가시키기 위한 하드웨어 가상화 기술 또한 성장하고 있다. 가상화의 특성상 이를 구동하고 관리하는 시스템 관리자가 메모리, 하드디스크 드라이브와 같은 컴퓨팅 리소스에 접근할 수 있다. 관리자에 의한 Cold-boot Attack이나 내부 명령어를 통해서 메모리 상의 데이터가 유출될 수 있으므로 개인정보와 기밀문서와 같은 민감한 데이터의 노출 위험이 발생한다. C. Li 등은 Guest OS의 가상 메모리 기본 단위인 페이지를 암호화하여 관리자에게 메모리 상의 데이터가 노출되지 않도록 막는 기법을 제안하였다. 하지만 페이지 암호화에 사용되는 키를 하이퍼바이저상에서 구하는 과정에서 키가 노출된다는 문제점이 발생한다. 본 논문에서는 내부자 공격에 안전한 가상 머신 프레임워크를 제안한다. IOMMU(Input/Output Memory Management Unit)를 사용하여 직접 하드웨어 디바이스에 접근 가능한 Guest OS를 생성하고 TPM(Trusted Platform Module) 가상화를 사용하여 시스템 관리자가 알 수 없도록 암호 키를 생성/관리한다. 하이퍼바이저는 이 암호 키를 사용하여 Guest OS의 페이지를 암호화한다. 이를 통해 관리자에게 키를 노출하지 않고 Guest OS 메모리 상의 데이터를 보호할 수 있다.