We define and demonstrate an approach to securing dis- tributed computation based on a shared reference monitor (Shamon) that enforces mandatory access control (MAC) policies across a distributed set of machines. The Shamon enables local reference monitor guarantees to be attained for a set of reference monitors on these machines. We im- plement a prototype system on the Xen hypervisor with a trusted MAC virtual machine built on Linux 2.6 whose reference monitor design requires only 13 authorization checks, only 5 of which apply to normal processing (others are for policy setup). We show that, through our architec- ture, distributed computations can be protected and con- trolled coherently across all the machines involved in the computation.
Citation:
Jonathan M. McCune, Trent Jaeger, Stefan Berger, Ramon Caceres, Reiner Sailer, "Shamon: A System for Distributed Mandatory Access Control," acsac, pp.23-32, 22nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'06), 2006