DESIGN OF VIRTUAL MACHINE

• US 20100154042A1
• Filed: 12/12/2008
• Published: 06/17/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 12/12/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Okamoto, Kohsuke, Miyamoto, Takashi
• Granted Patent: US 8,312,268 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 726/7
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/30 Authentication, i.e. establishing the identity or authorisation of security principals
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/31 User authentication
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/44 Program or device authentication
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/53 by executing in a restricted environment, e.g. sandbox or secure virtual machine
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/08 for authentication of entities cryptographic mechanisms or cryptographic arrangements for entity authentication H04L9/32
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/1458 Denial of Service
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/3263 involving certificates, e.g. public key certificate [PKC] or attribute certificate [AC]; Public key infrastructure [PKI] arrangements network architectures or network communication protocols for supporting authentication of entities using certificates in a packet data network H04L63/0823

Abstract

The present invention is directed to various systems and/or methods relating to a software platform that provides for authentication of a requestor. Preferably, this authentication happens before there is an opportunity for any resource intensive request to harm operation of the system. Preferably, a reliability level is based on authentication so that the amount and/or type of resource access is controlled based, at least in part, on the authentication information. Preferably, heap usage is controlled by this reliability level. Preferably, the software platform is a virtual machine, preferably the Java Virtual Machine.

Claims

1. A method of using a software platform, the method comprising the steps of:

receiving a request from a requester;

determining authentication information in the received request;

setting a reliability level from among a plurality of reliability levels based on the authentication information determined in the determining step; and

after the setting step, controlling a resource allocation allowed in a response to the request by the software platform based on the reliability level set at the setting step.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the controlling step is performed before the request can cause any substantial use of a shared area of memory.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein:

the software platform is a VM including a heap memory; and

the control of the controlling step includes an upper limit on heap usage based on the reliability level set at the setting step.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein the software platform is a JVM.

5. The method of claim 3 further comprising the steps of:

creating a thread in response to the received request; and

associating the thread with the reliability level set at the setting step;

wherein the controlling step has begun to be performed before the thread can cause any substantial use of the heap.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein, at the determining step, it is determined whether the authentication information includes at least one of the following types of authentication information:

personal identification of the requester, identification of a requestor'"'"'s computer, identification of a service provider associated with requester, and/or SSL client certification.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein:

the plurality of reliability levels include at least an authenticated level and a blacklisted level; and

at the controlling step, use of shared memory is limited based on the reliability level set at the setting step.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein, at the controlling step, the control of a resource allocation allowed in a response to the request is based in part upon at least one factor in addition to the reliability level, including at least one of the following possible factors:

time since last request by the requester, past history of requests by requestor to the software platform, and/or past history of requests by the requester to other software platforms.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein:

at the receiving step, the request is received over a computer network;

at the receiving step, the request includes at least one XML document; and

the setting step is performed and the controlling step is begun to be performed before the at least one XML document is parsed.

10. A software platform system comprising:

a first resource;

a container controller module structured and/or programmed to receive a request from a requestor and to determine authentication information in the request; and

a policy module structured and/or programmed to set a reliability level from among a plurality of reliability levels based on the authentication information;

wherein the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to at least partially control resource allocation of the first resource in a response to the request by the software platform based on the reliability level.

11. The system of claim 10 wherein the first resource is a shared area of memory.

12. The system of claim 10 wherein:

the software platform system is a VM;

the first resource is a heap memory; and

the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to set an upper limit on heap usage based on the reliability level.

13. The system of claim 12 wherein the software platform system is a JVM.

14. The system of claim 12 further wherein the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to create a thread in response to the request and to associate the thread with the reliability level and to begin controlling resource allocation to the heap by the thread before any substantial use of the heap by the thread.

15. The system of claim 10 wherein the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to determine whether the authentication information includes at least one of the following types of authentication information:

personal identification of the requester, identification of a requestor'"'"'s computer, identification of a service provider associated with requester, and/or SSL client certification.

16. The system of claim 10 wherein:

the plurality of reliability levels include at least an authenticated level and a blacklisted level; and

the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to limit use of shared memory based on the reliability level.

17. The system of claim 10 wherein the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to control resource allocation of the first resource based in part upon at least one factor in addition to the reliability level, including at least one of the following possible factors:

time since last request by the requester, past history of requests by requestor to the software platform, and/or past history of requests by the requestor to other software platforms.

18. The system of claim 10 further comprising:

a policy database structured and/or programmed to store and provide policy information relating to reliability levels and/or associated resource allocation limits to the policy module; and

a user registry structured and/or programmed to store and provide user information to the policy module.

19. The system of claim 10 further comprising a servlet container, wherein:

the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to created a servlet thread in response to the request;

the servlet container includes the servlet thread, the container controller module and the policy module; and

the first resource is a heap area of a VM webserver.

20. A computer readable medium for use with a first resource, the medium comprising:

a container controller module structured and/or programmed to receive a request from a requester and to determine authentication information in the request; and

a policy module structured and/or programmed to set a reliability level from among a plurality of reliability levels based on the authentication information;

wherein the container controller module is further structured and/or programmed to at least partially control resource allocation of the first resource in a response to the request by the software platform based on the reliability level.