Signature Assignment (SA) is a programming project entitled “Implement a virtual

Question

Signature Assignment (SA) is a programming project entitled

“Implement a virtual machine-based operating system with SaaS service extension”

Background in real world: Operating system is an interface between users and hardware, a virtual machine-based operating system extends traditional operating system boundaries into SaaS service.

New challenge in real world: Such a new architecture for Operating systems which combines both distributed systems and monolithic systems together to address emerging requirements from pervasive computing and other modern technologies such as AI .

CSC502 Signature Assignment achieves following CLOs:

Students have to identify key features of different components in an Operating system. This step is in the scope of CSC502 CLO “Master important operating system concepts such as memory, process, filesystem and I/O device management”.

Students have to implement key components such as drivers, file systems in both operating systems and distributed systems. This step is in the scope of CSC502 CLO “Able to design and implement important algorithms in operating systems as well as individual OS components in real environment”.

Students have to design own algorithms and write code to implement them on a new operating system. This step is in the scope of CSC502 CLO “Understand the algorithms and techniques used in modern Operating System such as multi-threading, synchronization, scheduling, virtual memory”

Explanation / Answer

Operating system-based virtualization is the installation of virtualization software in a pre-existing operating system, which is called the host operating system (Figure 1). For example, a user whose workstation has a specific version of Windows installed decides it wants to generate virtual machines. It installs the virtualization software into its host operating system like any other program and uses this application to generate and operate one or more virtual machine. This user needs to use its virtualization software to enable direct access to any of the generated virtual machines. Since the host operating system can provide hardware devices with the necessary support, operating system virtualization can rectify hardware compatibility issues even if the hardware driver is unavailable to the virtualization software.

Hardware independence that is enabled by virtualization allows hardware IT resources to be more flexibly used. For example, let's take a scenario in which the host operating system has the software necessary for controlling five network adapters that are available to the physical computer. The virtualization software can make the five network adapters available to the virtual machine, even if the virtualized operating system is usually incapable of physically housing five network adapters.

Contemporary OS security systems were designed to protect users of a system against each other and to protect the OS from errant programs. These security architectures were developed in the quaint past when code came from trusted sources and networks connected us with our friends and colleagues. In todays connected world, users and computers are surrounded by unscrupulous advertisers, petty criminals, and increasingly organized crime. In this world in which executable code can and does come from anywhere, the OS needs to protect user and system resources from potentially hostile code that a user runs either intentionally or unintentionally. This is a very hard problem given that desired code may do useful work!

To bring code into an OS security model, there must be a basic OS abstraction that represents the identity of code. The abstraction should also capture the provenance of the code as well as provide a means for checking code integrity. Once code is identifiable, we can imagine enforcing security policy pertaining to it.

Code identity alone, however, is not sufficient. Software components interact in exceedingly complex ways, and many such interactions are security-relevant. We can expect the next generation of attacks to exploit unplanned and unprotected interactions between software components. There is fertile ground for research in understanding how to prevent such attacks by design.

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