Context Sensitive File System

Britton Dennis, Tyler Travis, Clark Wood


Motivation

Analyizing the environmental / system context is becoming more and more important with the rise of BYOD (mobile phones / tablets), cheaper storage (USB flash / external hard drives), and ubiquitous wireless networks(public wifi / cellular networks). As such, the focus on the security of these contexts should also be becoming important. However, as seen from our related works, this is not the case.

System Overview

Our system is comprised of two parts, a user level deamon called the context monitor and a VFS complient file system.

Subsystems Used/Modified

We modifed ext3 from kernel v3.8.5. We tried to provide as much functionality as possible but were only able to finish the following file operations: read, read directory, open, close, and create. We also added two new ioctl calls, which a user level deamon we call the context monitor sends as it scans the system for vernerabilies.

Related Works

The following are systems similar to ours that fail to provide some aspect or another that we are looking for:

Distribution of Work (i.e. who to blame for bugs, errors, and faults)