Network security isolation technology is an important means to protect the internal information security of enterprises. Generally, isolation is achieved through traditional network devices, such as firewalls and gatekeepers. However, the security rules are relatively rigid and cannot better meet the flexible and changeable business needs. Through the double sandbox structure created for each user, each user in the virtual machine is isolated from each other and security is ensured. By creating a virtual disk in a virtual machine as a user storage sandbox, and encrypting the read and write of the disk, the shortcomings of traditional network isolation methods are discussed, and the application of cloud desktop network isolation technology based on VMwarer technology in universities is expounded.

Hardware breakpoints are used to monitor the behavior of a program on a virtual machine (VM). Although a virtual machine monitor (VMM) can inspect programs on a VM at hardware breakpoints, the programs themselves can detect hardware breakpoints by reading debug registers. Malicious programs may change their behavior to avoid introspection and other security mechanisms if a hardware breakpoint is detected. To prevent introspection evasion, methods for hiding hardware breakpoints by returning a fake value to the VM are proposed. These methods detect the read and write operations of the debug register from the VM and then return the processing to the VM as if their access has succeeded. However, VM introspection remains detectable from the VM by confirming the availability of the debug exception in the address set. While the previous work handles the read and write operations of the debug register, the debug exception is not delivered to the VM program. To address this problem, this study presents a method for making hardware breakpoints compatible with VM introspection. The proposed method uses surplus debug address registers to deliver the debug exception at the hardware breakpoint set by the VM program. If a VM program attempts to write a value to a debug register, the VMM detects and stores the value in a real debug register that is not used for VM introspection. Because debug exception at the hardware breakpoint was delivered to the VM, hardware breakpoints set by the VM were compatible with VM introspection. The evaluation results showed that the proposed method had a low performance overhead.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), from the initial goal of moving digital assets, allows more advanced approaches as smart contracts executed on distributed computational enabling nodes such as Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVM) initially available only on the Ethereum ledger. Since the release of different EVM-based ledgers, the use cases to incentive the integration of smart contracts on other domains, such as IoT environments, increased. In this paper, we analyze the most IoT environment expedient quantitative metrics of various popular EVM-enabling ledgers to provide an overview of potential EVMenabling characteristics.

Pen-testing or penetration testing is an exercise embraced to differentiate and take advantage of all the possible weaknesses in a system or network. It certifies the reasonability or deficiency of the security endeavours which have been executed. Our manuscript shows an outline of pen testing. We examine all systems, the advantages, and respective procedure of pen testing. The technique of pen testing incorporates following stages: Planning of the tests, endlessly tests investigation. The testing stage includes the following steps: Weakness investigation, data gathering and weakness exploitation. This manuscript furthermore shows the application of this procedure to direct pen testing on the model of the web applications.

With the development of information networks, cloud computing, big data, and virtualization technologies promote the emergence of various new network applications to meet the needs of various Internet services. A security protection system for virtual host in cloud computing center is proposed in the article. The system takes "security as a service" as the starting point, takes virtual machines as the core, and takes virtual machine clusters as the unit to provide unified security protection against the borderless characteristics of virtualized computing. The thesis builds a network security protection system for APT attacks; uses the system dynamics method to establish a system capability model, and conducts simulation analysis. The simulation results prove the validity and rationality of the network communication security system framework and modeling analysis method proposed in the thesis. Compared with traditional methods, this method has more comprehensive modeling and analysis elements, and the deduced results are more instructive.

Python continues to be one of the most popular programming languages and has been used in many safetycritical fields such as medical treatment, autonomous driving systems, and data science. These fields put forward higher security requirements to Python ecosystems. However, existing studies on machine learning systems in Python concentrate on data security, model security and model privacy, and just assume the underlying Python virtual machines (PVMs) are secure and trustworthy. Unfortunately, whether such an assumption really holds is still unknown.

Java-based applications are widely used by companies, government agencies, and financial institutions. Every day, these applications process a considerable amount of sensitive data, such as people’s credit card numbers and passwords. Research has found that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), an essential component for executing Java-based applications, stores data in memory for an unknown period of time even after the data are no longer used. This mismanagement of JVM puts all the data, sensitive or non-sensitive, in danger and raises a huge concern to all Java-based applications globally. This problem has serious implications for many “secure” applications that employ Javabased frameworks or libraries with a severe security risk of having sensitive data that attackers can access after the data are thought to be cleared. This paper presents a prototype of a secure Java API we design through an undergraduate student research project. The API is implemented using direct Byte buffer so that sensitive data are not managed by JVM garbage collection. We also implement the API using obfuscation so that data are encrypted. Using an initial experimental evaluation, the proposed secure API can successfully protect sensitive data from being accessed by malicious users.

A huge number of cloud users and cloud providers are threatened of security issues by cloud computing adoption. Cloud computing is a hub of virtualization that provides virtualization-based infrastructure over physically connected systems. With the rapid advancement of cloud computing technology, data protection is becoming increasingly necessary. It s important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of moving to cloud computing when deciding whether to do so. As a result of security and other problems in the cloud, cloud clients need more time to consider transitioning to cloud environments. Cloud computing, like any other technology, faces numerous challenges, especially in terms of cloud security. Many future customers are wary of cloud adoption because of this. Virtualization Technologies facilitates the sharing of recourses among multiple users. Cloud services are protected using various models such as type-I and type-II hypervisors, OS-level, and unikernel virtualization but also offer a variety of security issues. Unfortunately, several attacks have been built in recent years to compromise the hypervisor and take control of all virtual machines running above it. It is extremely difficult to reduce the size of a hypervisor due to the functions it offers. It is not acceptable for a safe device design to include a large hypervisor in the Trusted Computing Base (TCB). Virtualization is used by cloud computing service providers to provide services. However, using these methods entails handing over complete ownership of data to a third party. This paper covers a variety of topics related to virtualization protection, including a summary of various solutions and risk mitigation in VMM (virtual machine monitor). In this paper, we will discuss issues possible with a malicious virtual machine. We will also discuss security precautions that are required to handle malicious behaviors. We notice the issues of investigating malicious behaviors in cloud computing, give the scientific categorization and demonstrate the future headings. We ve identified: i) security specifications for virtualization in Cloud computing, which can be used as a starting point for securing Cloud virtual infrastructure, ii) attacks that can be conducted against Cloud virtual infrastructure, and iii) security solutions to protect the virtualization environment from DDOS attacks.

Virtualization is essential in assisting businesses in lowering operational costs while still ensuring increased productivity, better hardware utilization, and flexibility. According to Patrick Lin, Senior Director of Product Management for VMware, "virtualization is both an opportunity and a threat." This survey gives a review of the literature on major virtualization technology security concerns. Our study primarily focuses on several open security flaws that virtualization introduces into the environment. Virtual machines (VMs) are overtaking physical machine infrastructures due to their capacity to simulate hardware environments, share hardware resources, and make use of a range of operating systems (OS). By offering a higher level of hardware abstraction and isolation, efficient external monitoring and recording, and on-demand access, VMs offer more effective security architecture than traditional machines. It concentrates on virtual machine-specific security concerns. The security risks mentioned in this proposal apply to all of the virtualization technologies now on the market; they are not unique to any one particular virtualization technology. In addition to some security advantages that come along with virtualization, the survey first gives a brief review of the various virtualization technologies that are now on the market. It conclude by going into great depth on a number of security gaps in the virtualized environment.

Virtualization is essential in assisting businesses in lowering operational costs while still ensuring increased productivity, better hardware utilization, and flexibility. According to Patrick Lin, Senior Director of Product Management for VMware, "virtualization is both an opportunity and a threat." This survey gives a review of the literature on major virtualization technology security concerns. Our study primarily focuses on several open security flaws that virtualization introduces into the environment. Virtual machines (VMs) are overtaking physical machine infrastructures due to their capacity to simulate hardware environments, share hardware resources, and make use of a range of operating systems (OS). By offering a higher level of hardware abstraction and isolation, efficient external monitoring and recording, and on-demand access, VMs offer more effective security architecture than traditional machines. It concentrates on virtual machine-specific security concerns. The security risks mentioned in this proposal apply to all of the virtualization technologies now on the market; they are not unique to any one particular virtualization technology. In addition to some security advantages that come along with virtualization, the survey first gives a brief review of the various virtualization technologies that are now on the market. It conclude by going into great depth on a number of security gaps in the virtualized environment.

By analyzing the design requirements of a secure desktop virtualization information system, this paper proposes the security virtualization technology of "whitelist" security mechanism, the virtualization layer security technology of optimized design, and the virtual machine security technology of resource and network layer isolation. On this basis, this paper constructs the overall architecture of the secure desktop virtualization information system. This paper studies the desktop virtualization technology research based on VMware using VMware server virtualization solution to transform and upgrade the traditional intelligent desktop virtualization system, improve server resource utilization rate, and reduce operation and maintenance costs.

Network Security Architecture - Network security isolation technology is an important means to protect the internal information security of enterprises. Generally, isolation is achieved through traditional network devices, such as firewalls and gatekeepers. However, the security rules are relatively rigid and cannot better meet the flexible and changeable business needs. Through the double sandbox structure created for each user, each user in the virtual machine is isolated from each other and security is ensured. By creating a virtual disk in a virtual machine as a user storage sandbox, and encrypting the read and write of the disk, the shortcomings of traditional network isolation methods are discussed, and the application of cloud desktop network isolation technology based on VMwarer technology in universities is expounded.

Middleware Security - Virtual machine (VM) based application sandboxes leverage strong isolation guarantees of virtualization techniques to address several security issues through effective containment of malware. Specifically, in end-user physical hosts, potentially vulnerable applications can be isolated from each other (and the host) using VM based sandboxes. However, sharing data across applications executing within different sandboxes is a nontrivial requirement for end-user systems because at the end of the day, all applications are used by the end-user owning the device. Existing file sharing techniques compromise the security or efficiency, especially considering lack of technical expertise of many end-users in the contemporary times.

Malware Analysis - This document addresses the issue of the actual security level of PDF documents. Two types of detection approaches are utilized to detect dangerous elements within malware: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Analyzing malware binaries to identify dangerous strings, as well as reverse-engineering is included in static analysis for t1he malware to disassemble it. On the other hand, dynamic analysis monitors malware activities by running them in a safe environment, such as a virtual machine. Each method has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, and it is usually best to employ both methods while analyzing malware. Malware detection could be simplified without sacrificing accuracy by reducing the number of malicious traits. This may allow the researcher to devote more time to analysis. Our worry is that there is no obvious need to identify malware with numerous functionalities when it isn t necessary. We will solve this problem by developing a system that will identify if the given file is infected with malware or not.

Malware Analysis - This document addresses the issue of the actual security level of PDF documents. Two types of detection approaches are utilized to detect dangerous elements within malware: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Analyzing malware binaries to identify dangerous strings, as well as reverse-engineering is included in static analysis for t1he malware to disassemble it. On the other hand, dynamic analysis monitors malware activities by running them in a safe environment, such as a virtual machine. Each method has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, and it is usually best to employ both methods while analyzing malware. Malware detection could be simplified without sacrificing accuracy by reducing the number of malicious traits. This may allow the researcher to devote more time to analysis. Our worry is that there is no obvious need to identify malware with numerous functionalities when it isn t necessary. We will solve this problem by developing a system that will identify if the given file is infected with malware or not.

Internet-scale Computing Security - Cloud computing forms the backbone of the era of automation and the Internet of Things (IoT). It offers computing and storage-based services on consumption-based pricing. Large-scale datacenters are used to provide these service and consumes enormous electricity. Datacenters contribute a large portion of the carbon footprint in the environment. Through virtual machine (VM) consolidation, datacenter energy consumption can be reduced via efficient resource management. VM selection policy is used to choose the VM that needs migration. In this research, we have proposed PbV mSp: A priority-based VM selection policy for VM consolidation. The PbV mSp is implemented in cloudsim and evaluated compared with well-known VM selection policies like gpa, gpammt, mimt, mums, and mxu. The results show that the proposed PbV mSp selection policy has outperformed the exisitng policies in terms of energy consumption and other metrics.

This document addresses the issue of the actual security level of PDF documents. Two types of detection approaches are utilized to detect dangerous elements within malware: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Analyzing malware binaries to identify dangerous strings, as well as reverse-engineering is included in static analysis for t1he malware to disassemble it. On the other hand, dynamic analysis monitors malware activities by running them in a safe environment, such as a virtual machine. Each method has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, and it is usually best to employ both methods while analyzing malware. Malware detection could be simplified without sacrificing accuracy by reducing the number of malicious traits. This may allow the researcher to devote more time to analysis. Our worry is that there is no obvious need to identify malware with numerous functionalities when it isn t necessary. We will solve this problem by developing a system that will identify if the given file is infected with malware or not.

This paper introduces a new type of attack on isolated, air-gapped workstations. Although air-gap computers have no wireless connectivity, we show that attackers can use the SATA cable as a wireless antenna to transfer radio signals at the 6 GHz frequency band. The Serial ATA (SATA) is a bus interface widely used in modern computers and connects the host bus to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. The prevalence of the SATA interface makes this attack highly available to attackers in a wide range of computer systems and IT environments. We discuss related work on this topic and provide technical background. We show the design of the transmitter and receiver and present the implementation of these components. We also demonstrate the attack on different computers and provide the evaluation. The results show that attackers can use the SATA cable to transfer a brief amount of sensitive information from highly secured, air-gap computers wirelessly to a nearby receiver. Furthermore, we show that the attack can operate from user mode, is effective even from inside a Virtual Machine (VM), and can successfully work with other running workloads in the background. Finally, we discuss defense and mitigation techniques for this new air-gap attack.

In recent years, the epidemic of speculative side channels significantly increases the difficulty in enforcing domain isolation boundaries in a virtualized cloud environment. Although mitigations exist, the approach taken by the industry is neither a long-term nor a scalable solution, as we target each vulnerability with specific mitigations that add up to substantial performance penalties. We propose a different approach to secret isolation: guaranteeing that the hypervisor is Secret-Free (SF). A Secret-Free design partitions memory into secrets and non-secrets and reconstructs hypervisor isolation. It enforces that all domains have a minimal and secret-free view of the address space. In contrast to state-of-the-art, a Secret-Free hypervisor does not identify secrets to be hidden, but instead identifies non-secrets that can be shared, and only grants access necessary for the current operation, an allow-list approach. SF designs function with existing hardware and do not exhibit noticeable performance penalties in production workloads versus the unmitigated baseline, and outperform state-of-the-art techniques by allowing speculative execution where secrets are invisible. We implement SF in Xen (a Type-I hypervisor) to demonstrate that the design applies well to a commercial hypervisor. Evaluation shows performance comparable to baseline and up to 37% improvement in certain hypervisor paths compared with Xen default mitigations. Further, we demonstrate Secret-Free is a generic kernel isolation infrastructure for a variety of systems, not limited to Type-I hypervisors. We apply the same model in Hyper-V (Type-I), bhyve (Type-II) and FreeBSD (UNIX kernel) to evaluate its applicability and effectiveness. The successful implementations on these systems prove the generality of SF, and reveal the specific adaptations and optimizations required for each type of kernel.

Python continues to be one of the most popular programming languages and has been used in many safety-critical fields such as medical treatment, autonomous driving systems, and data science. These fields put forward higher security requirements to Python ecosystems. However, existing studies on machine learning systems in Python concentrate on data security, model security and model privacy, and just assume the underlying Python virtual machines (PVMs) are secure and trustworthy. Unfortunately, whether such an assumption really holds is still unknown.This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first and most comprehensive empirical study on the security of CPython, the official and most deployed Python virtual machine. To this end, we first designed and implemented a software prototype dubbed PVMSCAN, then use it to scan the source code of the latest CPython (version 3.10) and other 10 versions (3.0 to 3.9), which consists of 3,838,606 lines of source code. Empirical results give relevant findings and insights towards the security of Python virtual machines, such as: 1) CPython virtual machines are still vulnerable, for example, PVMSCAN detected 239 vulnerabilities in version 3.10, including 55 null dereferences, 86 uninitialized variables and 98 dead stores; Python/C API-related vulnerabilities are very common and have become one of the most severe threats to the security of PVMs: for example, 70 Python/C API-related vulnerabilities are identified in CPython 3.10; 3) the overall quality of the code remained stable during the evolution of Python VMs with vulnerabilities per thousand line (VPTL) to be 0.50; and 4) automatic vulnerability rectification is effective: 166 out of 239 (69.46%) vulnerabilities can be rectified by a simple yet effective syntax-directed heuristics.We have reported our empirical results to the developers of CPython, and they have acknowledged us and already confirmed and fixed 2 bugs (as of this writing) while others are still being analyzed. This study not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, but also highlights the need to improve the reliability of infrastructures like Python virtual machines by leveraging state-of-the-art security techniques and tools.

The use of Virtual Machine (VM) migration as support for software rejuvenation was introduced more than a decade ago. Since then, several works have validated this approach from experimental and theoretical perspectives. Recently, some works shed light on the possibility of using the same technique as Moving Target Defense (MTD). However, to date, no work evaluated the availability and security levels while applying VM migration for both rejuvenation and MTD (multipurpose VM migration). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation using Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models to tackle this challenge. The evaluation covers the steady-state system availability, expected MTD protection, and related metrics of a system under time-based multipurpose VM migration. Results show that the availability and security improvement due to VM migration deployment surpasses 50% in the best scenarios. However, there is a trade-off between availability and security metrics, meaning that improving one implies compromising the other.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) have been used to increase the level of network security for many years. The main purpose of such systems is to detect and block malicious activity in the network traffic. Researchers have been improving the performance of IDS technology for decades by applying various machine-learning techniques. From the perspective of academia, obtaining a quality dataset (i.e. a sufficient amount of captured network packets that contain both malicious and normal traffic) to support machine learning approaches has always been a challenge. There are many datasets publicly available for research purposes, including NSL-KDD, KDDCUP 99, CICIDS 2017 and UNSWNB15. However, these datasets are becoming obsolete over time and may no longer be adequate or valid to model and validate IDSs against state-of-the-art attack techniques. As attack techniques are continuously evolving, datasets used to develop and test IDSs also need to be kept up to date. Proven performance of an IDS tested on old attack patterns does not necessarily mean it will perform well against new patterns. Moreover, existing datasets may lack certain data fields or attributes necessary to analyse some of the new attack techniques. In this paper, we argue that academia needs up-to-date high-quality datasets. We compare publicly available datasets and suggest a way to provide up-to-date high-quality datasets for researchers and the security industry. The proposed solution is to utilize the network traffic captured from the Locked Shields exercise, one of the world’s largest live-fire international cyber defence exercises held annually by the NATO CCDCOE. During this three-day exercise, red team members consisting of dozens of white hackers selected by the governments of over 20 participating countries attempt to infiltrate the networks of over 20 blue teams, who are tasked to defend a fictional country called Berylia. After the exercise, network packets captured from each blue team’s network are handed over to each team. However, the countries are not willing to disclose the packet capture (PCAP) files to the public since these files contain specific information that could reveal how a particular nation might react to certain types of cyberattacks. To overcome this problem, we propose to create a dedicated virtual team, capture all the traffic from this team’s network, and disclose it to the public so that academia can use it for unclassified research and studies. In this way, the organizers of Locked Shields can effectively contribute to the advancement of future artificial intelligence (AI) enabled security solutions by providing annual datasets of up-to-date attack patterns.

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the use of smart control systems in many mission-critical or safety-critical applications domains, like automotive or aeronautical, make devices attractive targets for attackers. Nowadays, several of these are mixed-criticality systems, i.e., they run both high-criticality tasks (e.g., a car control system) and low-criticality ones (e.g., infotainment). High-criticality routines often employ Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to enforce hard real-time requirements, while the tasks with lower constraints can be delegated to more generic-purpose operating systems (GPOS).Much of the control code for these devices is written in memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++. This makes them susceptible to powerful binary attacks, such as the famous Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is the most investigated security technique to protect against such threats. At now, CFI solutions for real-time embedded systems are not as mature as the ones for general-purpose systems, and even more, there is a lack of in-depth studies on how different operating systems with different security requirements and timing constraints can coexist on a single multicore platform.This paper aims at drawing attention to the subject, discussing the current scientific proposal, and in turn proposing a solution for an optimized asymmetric verification system for execution integrity. By using an embedded hypervisor, predefined cores could be dedicated to only high or low-criticality tasks, with the high-priority core being monitored by the lower-criticality core, relying on offline binary instrumentation and a light exchange of information and signals at runtime. The work also presents preliminary results about a possible implementation for multicore ARM platforms, running both RTOS and GPOS, both in terms of security and performance penalties.

Network security isolation technology is an important means to protect the internal information security of enterprises. Generally, isolation is achieved through traditional network devices, such as firewalls and gatekeepers. However, the security rules are relatively rigid and cannot better meet the flexible and changeable business needs. Through the double sandbox structure created for each user, each user in the virtual machine is isolated from each other and security is ensured. By creating a virtual disk in a virtual machine as a user storage sandbox, and encrypting the read and write of the disk, the shortcomings of traditional network isolation methods are discussed, and the application of cloud desktop network isolation technology based on VMwarer technology in universities is expounded.

Virtual machine (VM) based application sandboxes leverage strong isolation guarantees of virtualization techniques to address several security issues through effective containment of malware. Specifically, in end-user physical hosts, potentially vulnerable applications can be isolated from each other (and the host) using VM based sandboxes. However, sharing data across applications executing within different sandboxes is a non-trivial requirement for end-user systems because at the end of the day, all applications are used by the end-user owning the device. Existing file sharing techniques compromise the security or efficiency, especially considering lack of technical expertise of many end-users in the contemporary times. In this paper, we propose MicroBlind, a security hardened file sharing framework for virtualized sandboxes to support efficient data sharing across different application sandboxes. MicroBlind enables a simple file sharing management API for end users where the end user can orchestrate file sharing across different VM sandboxes in a secure manner. To demonstrate the efficacy of MicroBlind, we perform comprehensive empirical analysis against existing data sharing techniques (augmented for the sandboxing setup) and show that MicroBlind provides improved security and efficiency.