Abstract:

This paper highlights four major benefits of a robust virtualization technology commonly called a hypervisor. We establish what a hypervisors is, how it is different from today’s commercial operating systems and why it can provide a more reliable and robust mobile product platform. We then explain how an embedded hypervisor leads to a flexible platform product base, improves resource utilization, and provides reliable functional separation.

Introduction

Laptop and Desktop Personal Computing platforms today embrace an architecture that requires the operating system (OS) to be reliable, trustworthy, and capable of defending itself against attack under every conceivable circumstance. Why else would the OS be given the ownership of critical processes, security-related processes, and exclusive, unrestricted access to system resources?  However, it is well known that even when great care is taken to assure the OS is trustworthy and will behave correctly under stress conditions, the size and complexity of most OS products makes verification of correct behavior extremely difficult if not impossible, leaving large numbers of vulnerabilities undiscovered [3]. The obvious remedy of reducing the complexity of the OS is always overruled by the ever-increasing demand for more capabilities.

Mobile computing platforms have already started down the same path as their predecessors. As mobile platform hardware performance steadily improves, increased demand for high-end mobile computing is inevitable. Does this mean that mobile platforms are destined to inherit the endless number of stability and security issues associated with their less mobile predecessors? Something needs to change. An alternative is needed.

The quest for a trustworthy, stable and secure OS is not new, and an alternative to the present architecture was proposed almost three decades ago. In a 1981 paper, Dr Rushby showed that the security kernel architecture, that is, the architecture used by Laptop and Desktop Personal Computing platforms today, requires the OS kernel to absorb all trusted functionality. The result is a kernel that will grow too large to assure its trustworthiness, [1][2]. He proposed an alternative architecture called the “separation-kernel” architecture. In this new architecture, the kernel is a “thin” layer of software positioned between the hardware and everything else, and is the only software allowed unrestricted access to system hardware resources. This thin kernel is often called a hypervisor. By keeping the hypervis...