MANAGING HARDWARE REBOOT AND RESET IN SHARED ENVIRONMENTS

• US 20140351893A1
• Filed: 08/12/2014
• Published: 11/27/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 09/10/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Inventors: Corddry, Matthew T., Marr, Michael David, Hamilton, James R., De Santis, Peter N.
• Granted Patent: US 10,003,597 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 726/3
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4401 Bootstrapping security arrangements therefor G06F21/57
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/10 for controlling access to devices or network resources
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/125 involving control of end-device applications over a network
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/535 Tracking the activity of the user network monitoring arrangements H04L43/00; recording of computer activity G06F11/34

Abstract

In an environment such as a cloud computing environment where various guests can be provisioned on a host machine or other hardware device, it can be desirable to prevent those users from rebooting or otherwise restarting the machine or other resources using unauthorized information or images that can be obtained from across the network. A cloud manager can cause one or more network switches or other routing or communication processing components to deny communication access between user-accessible ports on a machine or device and the provisioning systems, or other specific network resources, such that the user cannot cause the host machine to pull information from those resources upon a restart or reboot of the machine. Further, various actions can be taken upon a reboot or attempted reboot, such as to isolate the host machine or even power off the specific machine.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

under control of one or more computer systems configured with executable instructions,

provisioning a customer on at least one of a plurality of host machines using at least one provisioning system on a network;

causing at least one switch, associated with communications between the at least one provisioned host machine and the at least one provisioning system, to disable communications between each provisioned host machine and each provisioning system for a duration of a time the customer is utilizing the at least one host machine, and while maintaining access to other communication paths of the network; and

causing the at least one switch between the at least one provisioned host machine and the at least one provisioning system to enable communications between each provisioned host machine and each provisioning system after the customer is no longer provisioned on the at least one host machine.