OPPORTUNISTIC SCHEDULING OF SECURE TASKS IN A MULTIPROCESSOR ENVIRONMENT
Titel:
OPPORTUNISTIC SCHEDULING OF SECURE TASKS IN A MULTIPROCESSOR ENVIRONMENT
Auteur:
P. A. Srihari R. M. Venkatesan S. Bhattacharya
Verschenen in:
Journal of integrated design & process science
Paginering:
Jaargang 3 (2002) nr. 2 pagina's 63-78
Jaar:
2002-05-29
Inhoud:
Covert channel is a growing concern for multilevel secure systems. This paper addresses the covert channel issue in the scheduling steps of precedence related set of tasks for multiprocessor environments. Existing solution approaches for covert channel elimination, with a totally ordered set of classes, would adopt a lower security class first (LSF) scheduling approach. Despite providing covert channel free scheduling, the LSF scheduler has well known performance disadvantages, e.g., increased response time for higher security class tasks. We propose an opportunistic scheduling (OPS) approach, which works in conjunction with LSF, but which can minimize the performance overheads of the LSF approach. The OPS policy identifies opportunities where a higher security class task can be executed prior to the completion of other lower class tasks, without creating any covert channels. This is a temporal relaxation of the overall LSF scheduling premise. However, we demonstrate that following the guidelines of the OPS scheduler such violations of the LSF policy cannot create any covert channels. Selection of the opportunities for the makespan reduction is done in a way that Multilevel security (MLS) requirements are satisfied. OPS, therefore, is an absolute improvement over the LSF approach without any significant performance overhead (or, security compromise). Performance benefits of the OPS, over the LSF scheduler, is shown by simulation.