Building Automated Trust Negotiation architecture in virtual computing environment

摘要

Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN) is an important method to establish trust relationship between two strangers by exchanging their access control policies and credentials. Unfortunately, ATN is not widely adopted because of the complexity and multiformity of negotiation policies, especially in virtual computing environment, where the situation becomes worse than in traditional computing environment, due to the fact that a host with multiple virtual machines needs to be deployed with multiple negotiation policies. Moreover, all of these policies for each virtual machine must be upgraded and checked. To ease the burden on the administrator when deploying ATN access control policies and credentials in virtual computing environment, we propose an automated trusted negotiation architecture called virtual automated trust negotiation (VATN) to centralize ATN policies and credentials for multiple virtual machines in a physical node into a privileged virtual machine. VATN puts policy compliance checker and credential verification control in each virtual machine to improve the execution efficiency of trust negotiation. We implement VATN in Xen virtualization platform. Finally, we discuss the correctness of policy consistency checking and make performance analysis of VATN implemented in Xen.