E2VT: An Effective and Efficient VM-Transparent Mechanism for Preventing TPVM OS Boot Failure

Integrating system-level virtualization technology with Trusted Computing technology can significantly improve system security. The open-source virtual TPM facility, shipped with the open-source hyper visor Xen, aims to provide the illusion of a physical TPM to TPM-based trusted software executed in trusted virtual machines (TVMs) such that TPM-based trusted software works well in a TVM as in a native Operating System (OS). However, it is not true for the trusted software which works in a trusted para-virtual machine (TPVM). The TPM command packets sent in the TPVM OS boot phase may cause the TPVM OS boot failure. This paper design and implement E2VT, an effective and efficient mechanism for preventing the TPVM OS boot failure while (1) being transparent to the TPVM system, (2) maintaining the original system performance, (3) making minimal modifications to the existing architecture. We validate our analysis and design through experiments.