Towards Assessing Isolation Properties in Partitioning Hypervisors

TL;DR

This work provides a systematic framework to provide a comprehensive, generalizable to different products that implement partitioning, and tied specifically to lower-level requirements that addresses this need.

Abstract

Partitioning hypervisor solutions are becoming increasingly popular, to ensure stringent security and safety requirements related to isolation between co-hosted applications and to make more efficient use of available hardware resources. However, assessment and certification of isolation requirements remain a challenge and it is not trivial to understand what and how to test to validate these properties. Although the high-level requirements to be verified are mentioned in the different security- and safety-related standards, there is a lack of precise guidelines for the evaluator. This guidance should be comprehensive, generalizable to different products that implement partitioning, and tied specifically to lower-level requirements. The goal of this work is to provide a systematic framework that addresses this need.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: ISO 15408: example of the mappings \ref{['mapA']} and \ref{['mapB']}
• Figure 2: Testing framework design