Trusted virtual domains on OpenSolaris: Usable secure desktop environments

Trusted Virtual Domains (TVDs) are a security concept to create separated domains over virtual and physical plat-forms. Since most existing TVD implementations focus on servers and data centers, there are only few efforts on secure desktop environments. To fill this gap, we present in this pa-per an implementation of TVDs based on the OpenSolaris operating system. We leverage several of its existing features (e.g., lightweight virtualization, security labels and a secure graphical user interface) and extend OpenSolaris with com-ponents for automated management and policy enforcement to create a usable desktop implementation of TVDs. This includes the transparent encryption of external storage and home directories of users, restriction of copy-and-paste ac-cording to the TVD policy, efficient deployment of images for user environments, and a central management interface for the administration. Our system enables organizations to securely separate different work flows with sensitive data from each other and from untrusted environments