SOSP2023

PVM: Efficient Shadow Paging for Deploying Secure Containers in Cloud-native Environment

Hang Huang, Jiangshan Lai, Jia Rao, Hui Lu, Wenlong Hou, Hang Su, Quan Xu, Jiang Zhong, Jiahao Zeng, Xu Wang, Zhengyu He, Weidong Han, Jiang Liu, Tao Ma, Song Wu

4 citations

Abstract

In cloud-native environments, containers are often deployed within lightweight virtual machines (VMs) to ensure strong security isolation and privacy protection. With the growing demand for customized cloud services, third-party vendors are turning to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud providers to build their own cloud-native platforms, necessitating the need to run a VM or a guest that hosts containers inside another VM instance leased from an IaaS cloud. State-of-the-art nested virtualization in the x86 architecture relies heavily on the host hypervisor to expose hardware virtualization support to the guest hypervisor, not only complicating cloud management but also raising concerns about an increased attack surface at the host hypervisor.