Building Shared Reference Monitor Systems
Trent Jaeger
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
In this talk, I will describe an architecture for building secure
distributed systems based on a Shared Reference Monitor (Shamon). A
Shamon consists of distributed security components that collaborate to
provide a single, coherent mechanism for enforcing mandatory access
control (MAC), achieving the function of a local reference monitor.
The challenge is to ensure the guarantees required of a reference
monitor: complete mediation over security sensitive operations;
tamper-protection of the Shamon mechanism and state; and verifiability
of correct enforcement of security goals. I will begin the talk by
discussing the vision of future Shamon distributed systems and
motivating why the recent emergence of ubiquitous virtual machine
systems and trusted computing hardware is necessary to achieve the
Shamon goals. I will then discuss our prototype Shamon system,
highlighting the design decisions required to satisfy the reference
monitor guarantees.
Biography
Trent Jaeger is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and
Engineering Department at The Pennsylvania State University and the
Co-Director of the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security Lab.
Trent's research interests include operating systems security, access
control, and source code and policy analysis tools. He has published
over 50 refereed research papers on these subjects. Trent has made a
variety of contributions to Linux security, particularly to the Linux
Security Modules framework, the SELinux module and policy development,
integrity measurement in Linux, and the Xen security architecture. He
is active in the security research community, having been a member of
the program committees of all the major security conferences. He has
been a guest editor of ACM TISSEC and program chair of ACM SACMAT and
ACM CCS Government and Industry Track. He is currently the Program
Chair for USENIX Hot Topics in Security. Trent has an M.S. and a
Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in Computer Science
and Engineering in 1993 and 1997, respectively.