A BLP-Based Access Control Mechanism for the Virtual Machine System

The virtual machine system such as Xen provides a security isolation between virtual machines (VM) running on the virtual machine monitor (VMM). With the wide application of the virtualization technology, VMM is expected to not only provide the simple isolation but also provide limited sharing between VMs in a secure manner. In this paper, we present an access control mechanism for the virtual machine system, which is based on the BLP model. We prove that the virtual machine system with the access control mechanism and an initial secure state is a secure system. In addition, we implement a prototype of the access control mechanism for the virtual machine system based on Xen.