Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems. 7th International ICST Conference, BROADNETS 2010, Athens, Greece, October 25–27, 2010, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Hi-sap: Secure and Scalable Web Server System for Shared Hosting Services

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-30376-0_9,
        author={Daisuke Hara and Ryohei Fukuda and Kazuki Hyoudou and Ryota Ozaki and Yasuichi Nakayama},
        title={Hi-sap: Secure and Scalable Web Server System for Shared Hosting Services},
        proceedings={Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems. 7th International ICST Conference, BROADNETS 2010, Athens, Greece, October 25--27, 2010, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2012},
        month={10},
        keywords={Security in a Server Shared Hosting Service Web Server Architecture Site-number Scalability},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-30376-0_9}
    }
    
  • Daisuke Hara
    Ryohei Fukuda
    Kazuki Hyoudou
    Ryota Ozaki
    Yasuichi Nakayama
    Year: 2012
    Hi-sap: Secure and Scalable Web Server System for Shared Hosting Services
    BROADNETS
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-30376-0_9
Daisuke Hara1,*, Ryohei Fukuda1, Kazuki Hyoudou1, Ryota Ozaki1, Yasuichi Nakayama1
  • 1: The University of Electro-Communications
*Contact email: hara-d@igo.cs.uec.ac.jp

Abstract

We propose , a Web server system that solves internal security problems in a server used for shared hosting services and that achieves high site-number scalability with little performance degradation. Customers are often exposed to internal attacks, i.e., malicious customers illegally access other customers’ files. Existing approaches solve a portion of this problem, but they are not enough from the view point of performance, site-number scalability, or generality. The proposed system protects customers’ files by isolating them in separate security domains, “partitions” that are unit of protection, using a secure OS facility. A default partition is a Web site, and each partition has a Web server instance that runs under the privilege of an individual user and serves files in the partition. Since the Web servers reuse server processes and can run without the burden of a security mechanism themselves, there is little performance degradation. In addition, since Hi-sap dynamically controls the number of Web servers, the number of partitions in a server is scalable. We implemented Hi-sap on a Linux OS and evaluated its effectiveness. Experimental results show that Hi-sap has up to 14.3 times the performance of suEXEC and achieves high scalability of 1000 sites per server.