libhermitMPK
Intra-Unikernel Isolation with Intel Memory Protection Keys
News
- Our paper is presented in VEE 2020. Check the conference talk video!
- Our libhermitMPK paper is accepted at VEE 2020!
libhermitMPK is a new design bringing memory isolation inside a unikernel instance while keeping a single address space. By leveraging Intel Memory Protection Keys (MPK), intra-unikernel isolation can be provided without impacting the lightweightness and performance benefits of unikernels. libhermitMPK provides isolation between trusted and untrusted components: (1) safe from unsafe Rust kernel code and (2) kernel from user code.
libhermitMPK is implemented on top of RustyHermit.
For more details see our VEE’20 paper.
Trying it out
libhermitMPK is open source and all the code and instructions are on GitHub:
Design Principles
libhermitMPK follows the design objectives: (1) preservation of a single address space, (2) isolation of various memory areas, and (3) negligible cost. Below are evaluation results to demonstrate the design principles.
write_bytes is an unsafe kernel function writing byte to an arbitrary address. The isolated write_bytes
introduces a 6% slowdown compared to the vanilla write_bytes when writing 4KB at a time.
The results of memory/compute intensive benchmarks from various suites including NPB, PARSEC, and Phoenix illustrate that the average slowdown imposed by the intra-unikernel isolation compared with the vanilla unikernel is only 0.6%
For a detailed description please read libhermitMPK’s VEE 2020 paper.
Contact
- Mincheol Sung, Virginia Tech: mincheol at vt.edu
- Pierre Olivier, The University of Manchester: pierre.olivier at manchester.ac.uk
- Binoy Ravindran, Virginia Tech: binoy at vt.edu
We also have a Slack channel for libhermitMPK.
libhermitMPK is an open-source project of the Systems Software Research Group at Virginia Tech.
libhermitMPK is supported in part by the US Office of Naval Research under grants N00014-18-1-2022, N00014-16-1-2104, and N00014-16-1-2711. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this site are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ONR.