The massive parallelism and resource sharing embodying todays cloud business model not only exacerbate the security challenge of timing channels, but also undermine the viability of defenses based on resource partitioning. We propose hypervisor-enfor
ced timing mitigation to control timing channels in cloud environments. This approach closes reference clocks internal to the cloud by imposing a deterministic view of time on guest code, and uses timing mitigators to pace I/O and rate-limit potential information leakage to external observers. Our prototype hypervisor is the first system to mitigate timing-channel leakage across full-scale existing operating systems such as Linux and applications in arbitrary languages. Mitigation incurs a varying performance cost, depending on workload and tunable leakage-limiting parameters, but this cost may be justified for security-critical cloud applications and data.
Obtaining and maintaining anonymity on the Internet is challenging. The state of the art in deployed tools, such as Tor, uses onion routing (OR) to relay encrypted connections on a detour passing through randomly chosen relays scattered around the In
ternet. Unfortunately, OR is known to be vulnerable at least in principle to several classes of attacks for which no solution is known or believed to be forthcoming soon. Current approaches to anonymity also appear unable to offer accurate, principled measurement of the level or quality of anonymity a user might obtain. Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, the first systematic effort to build a practical anonymity system based purely on foundations that offer measurable and formally provable anonymity properties. Dissent builds on two key pre-existing primitives - verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers - but for the first time shows how to scale such techniques to offer measurable anonymity guarantees to thousands of participants. Further, Dissent represents the first anonymity system designed from the ground up to incorporate some systematic countermeasure for each of the major classes of known vulnerabilities in existing approaches, including global traffic analysis, active attacks, and intersection attacks. Finally, because no anonymity protocol alone can address risks such as software exploits or accidental self-identification, we introduce WiNon, an experimental operating system architecture to harden the uses of anonymity tools such as Tor and Dissent against such attacks.
Despite the attempts of well-designed anonymous communication tools to protect users from tracking or identification, flaws in surrounding software (such as web browsers) and mistakes in configuration may leak the users identity. We introduce Nymix,
an anonymity-centric operating system architecture designed top-to-bottom to strengthen identity- and tracking-protection. Nymixs core contribution is OS support for nym-browsing: independent, parallel, and ephemeral web sessions. Each web session, or pseudonym, runs in a unique virtual machine (VM) instance evolving from a common base state with support for long-lived sessions which can be anonymously stored to the cloud, avoiding de-anonymization despite potential confiscation or theft. Nymix allows a user to safely browse the Web using various different transports simultaneously through a pluggable communication model that supports Tor, Dissent, and a private browsing mode. In evaluations, Nymix consumes 600 MB per nymbox and loads within 15 to 25 seconds.
