New Security Architectures Based on Emerging Disk Functionality

Securing operating systems has become increasingly difficult as their size and complexity continue to grow. New advances in hard disk technologies, however, provide a means for helping to manage this complexity; the new functionality made available at the disk level allows them to be used as security policy enforcement sites that are autonomous from the rest of the system. The proposed SwitchBlade architecture provides isolation for multiple OSs running on a single machine by confining them into segments that users can only access using a physical token. The authors show that the isolation guarantees SwitchBlade provides are equivalent to physically separate systems without the traditional usability burdens.