Fast switch into a trustworthy virtual machine for running security-sensitive applications

摘要

We aim to protect an end-user security-sensitive application by running it apart from the untrusted applications in a trusted virtual machine (VM), named the green VM. The untrusted applications are run in another, untrusted red VM. The two VMs are isolated by one another by a small, trusted hypervisor (HV). The user must switch from the red VM into the green VM when he wants to run the protected application. Therefore, this kind of switch should be fast enough for usability reasons. We propose different methods to build an as small as possible green VM, prepared to run only the protected application, though above a full-featured operating system (OS), in order to avoid rebuilding the application and support various hardware on the client system. The resulting VM would be more trustworthy, so more secure, and also could be booted faster, thus reducing considerably the VM-switch time.