Paper Info
Title
Light-Weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance.
Abstract
We introduce a new OS abstraction--light-weight contexts (lwCs)--that provides independent units of protection, privilege, and execution state within a process. A process may include several lwCs, each with possibly different views of memory, file descriptors, and access capabilities. lwCs can be used to efficiently implement roll-back (process can return to a prior recorded state), isolated address spaces (lwCs within the process may have different views of memory, e.g., isolating sensitive data from network-facing components or isolating different user sessions), and privilege separation (in-process reference monitors can arbitrate and control access). lwCs can be implemented efficiently: the overhead of a lwC is proportional to the amount of memory exclusive to the lwC; switching lwCs is quicker than switching kernel threads within the same process. We describe the lwC abstraction and API, and an implementation of lwCs within the FreeBSD 11.0 kernel. Finally, we present an evaluation of common usage patterns, including fast rollback, session isolation, sensitive data isolation, and inprocess reference monitoring, using Apache, nginx, PHP, and OpenSSL.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
OSDI
Kernel (linear algebra),Privilege separation,Isolation (database systems),Abstraction,Computer science,Real-time computing,Thread (computing),File descriptor,Rollback,Operating system
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
12
0.58
References 
Authors
18
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
James Litton1342.60
A. Vahldiek2333.80
Eslam Elnikety3584.37
Deepak Garg458145.48
Bobby Bhattacharjee53991257.36
Peter Druschel68715861.36