Re: RFC: virtual network access control

[Mike Day <ncmike@us.ibm.com>]

On 28/07/06 12:30 -0400, Reiner Sailer wrote:

>   > In terms of cost, an extra hypercall per packet will have measurable
>   > cost, at least in CPU usage, for high-bandwidth network transfers.
>   >
>   >   -- Keir
>   >
>   You only make the decision once for the first packet exchanged between
>   two interfaces. Afterwards you reuse this decision for this interface
>   pair (local cache). You basically have the cost of looking up a
>   decision locally.

This is a key principle of "shype" - that they hypervisor authorizes
the channel when it to be set up. As long as the channel persists
unchaged (no additional parties, not policy modifications) there is no
need to perform further authorization. It performs a different level
of authorization than packet filtering does, and it is another layer
of depth in a multi-layer defense.

Mike