Edouard Bugnion | EPFL Graph Search

Edouard Bugnion joined EPFL in 2012, where his focus is on datacenter systems. His areas of interest include operating systems, datacenter infrastructure (systems and networking), and computer architecture. Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the US, where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco). At VMware from 1998 until 2005, he played many roles including CTO. At Nuova/Cisco from 2005 until 2011, he helped build the core engineering team and became the VP/CTO of Ciscos Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group, a group that brought to market Ciscos Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for virtualized datacenters. Prof. Bugnion is a Fellow of the ACM. Together with his colleagues, he received the ACM Software System Award for VMware 1.0 in 2009. His paper Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors" received a Best Paper Award at SOSP '97 and was entered into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. At EPFL, he received the OSDI 2014 Best Paper Award for his work on the IX dataplane operating system

A RISC-V Extension to Minimize Privileges of Enclave Runtimes

Edouard Bugnion, Neelu Shivprakash Kalani

In confidential computing, the view of the system software is Manichean: the host operating system is untrusted and the TEE runtime system is fully trusted. However, the runtime system is often as complex as a full operating system, and thus is not free from bugs and exploitable vulnerabilities. Yet, it executes with complete system-level control over the enclave application, in violation of the least privilege principle. While the confidential computing research community has been striving to secure trusted software from its untrusted counterpart, efforts fall short when it comes to securing the enclave application from potentially bug-prone and vulnerable trusted runtime systems. This project describes the design of a simple RISC-V extension that prevents trusted runtime systems from accessing the enclave application's memory. We implement the hardware extension in the QEMU functional simulator and extend the Keystone TEE framework and its runtime system, Eyrie, to enforce the least privilege principle, support unmodified enclave applications, and prevent a class of Iago attacks that leverage the runtime system's unrestricted access to the enclave application's memory.

ACM2023

Benchmarking, Analysis, and Optimization of Serverless Function Snapshots

Edouard Bugnion, Boris Robert Grot, Evangelos Marios Kogias, Dmitrii Ustiugov

Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation, leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster invocation compared to booting a function from scratch. This work introduces vHive, an open-source framework for serverless experimentation with the goal of enabling researchers to study and innovate across the entire serverless stack. Using vHive, we characterize a state-of-the-art snapshot-based serverless infrastructure, based on industry-leading Containerd orchestration framework and Firecracker hypervisor technologies. We find that the execution time of a function started from a snapshot is 95% higher, on average, than when the same function is memory- resident. We show that the high latency is attributable to frequent page faults as the function’s state is brought from disk into guest memory one page at a time. Our analysis further reveals that funccloud computing, datacenters, serverless, virtualization, snapshotstions access the same stable working set of pages across different invocations of the same function. By leveraging this insight, we build REAP, a light-weight software mechanism for serverless hosts that records functions’ stable working set of guest memory pages and proactively prefetches it from disk into memory. Compared to baseline snapshotting, REAP slashes the cold-start delays by 3.7×, on average.

2021

Enclosure: Language-Based Restriction of Untrusted Libraries

Edouard Bugnion, Adrien Ghosn, Evangelos Marios Kogias, James Richard Larus, Mathias Josef Payer

Programming languages and systems have failed to address the security implications of the increasingly frequent use of public libraries to construct modern software. Most languages provide tools and online repositories to publish, import, and use libraries; however, this double-edged sword can incorporate a large quantity of unknown, unchecked, and unverified code into an application. The risk is real, as demonstrated by malevolent actors who have repeatedly inserted malware into popular open-source libraries. This paper proposes a solution: enclosures, a new programming language construct for library isolation that provides a developer with fine-grain control over the resources that a library can access, even for libraries with complex inter-library dependencies. The programming abstraction is language-independent and could be added to most languages. These languages would then be able to take advantage of hardware isolation mechanisms that are effective across language boundaries. The enclosure policies are enforced at run time by LitterBox, a language-independent framework that uses hardware mechanisms to provide uniform and robust isolation guarantees, even for libraries written in unsafe languages. LitterBox currently supports both Intel VT-x (with general-purpose extended page tables) and the emerging Intel Memory Protection Keys (MPK). We describe an enclosure implementation for the Go and Python languages. Our evaluation demonstrates that the Go implementation can protect sensitive data in real-world applications constructed using complex untrusted libraries with deep dependencies. It requires minimal code refactoring and incurs acceptable performance overhead. The Python implementation demonstrates LitterBox’s ability to support dynamic languages.

2021

Benchmarking, Analysis, and Optimization of Serverless Function Snapshots

Edouard Bugnion, Boris Robert Grot, Evangelos Marios Kogias, Dmitrii Ustiugov

2021