Welcome to the website for the FRIENDS research group. We do research on a variety of topics, including virtualization technologies, distributed computing, cyberinfrastructure computing, malware defense, and operating system security.
Here you can find out about us and the projects we are currently working on. The links on the left should be able to get you started. If you would like to contact us, please email Dongyan Xu.
News:
Magazine Coverage of FRIENDS Projects posted by Dongyan Xu on 07-30-2008
A recent article in Virtual Strategy Magazine, "Beyond Hypervisors", covers a number of FRIENDS Lab projects on virtualization, ranging from virtual distributed computing to virtualization-based malware defense. Read the article on line here (but look no further for the correct URL of our lab :-).
VN Snapshot with Minimal Downtime posted by Dongyan Xu on 07-18-2008
We are pleased to release our Technical Report on VNsnap, a system that takes snapshots of VIOLIN virtual networks with minimal downtime.
NICKLE: a Kernel Rootkit Defender posted by Ryan Riley on 04-07-2008
We are pleased to release our Technical Report on NICKLE, a VMM-based system that prevents kernel rootkit code injection without modifying the (Linux and Windows) kernel code. You can access the report here.
Update (5/31): A paper on NICKLE has been accepted to RAID'08.
Update (5/31): A paper on NICKLE has been accepted to RAID'08.
NDSS 2008 posted by Dongyan Xu on 11-21-2007
A paper entitled "Automatic Protocol Format Reverse Engineering through Context-Aware Monitored Execution" has been accepted to the 15th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2008). The authors are Zhiqiang Lin, Xuxian Jiang (ZQ's summer advisor), Dongyan Xu, and Xiangyu Zhang.
Snapshots of Virtual Networks posted by Dongyan Xu on 10-31-2007
A prototype system for taking live snapshots of VIOLIN virtual networks has been developed. A paper with preliminary results will appear in IEEE/ACM VTDC'07 Workshop. You can view a system demo here.
CCS 2007 posted by Dongyan Xu on 07-28-2007
A paper in collaboration with colleagues at George Mason University, "Stealthy Malware Detection Through VMM-Based "Out-of-the-Box" Semantic View Reconstruction", has been accepted to the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2007).
Update (8/18): The paper is now available on the GMU site.
Update (8/18): The paper is now available on the GMU site.
Code Injection Source Code Available posted by Ryan Riley on 06-22-2007
A quick and dirty project page has been put up for our DSN work "An Architectural Approach to Preventing Code Injection Attacks". The only thing new in any way is that the source code for the project is now available. If you want source, you can have it.