Bare-metal clouds are an emerging infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that leases physical machines (bare-metal instances) rather than virtual machines, allowing resource-intensive applications to have exclusive access to physical hardware. Unfortunately, bare-metal instances require time-consuming or OS-specific tasks for deployment due to the lack of virtualization layers, thereby sacrificing several beneficial features of traditional IaaS clouds such as agility, elasticity, and OS transparency. We present BMcast, an OS deployment system with a special-purpose de-virtualizable virtual machine monitor (VMM) that supports quick and OS-transparent startup of bare-metal instances. BMcast performs streaming OS deployment while allowing direct access to physical hardware from the guest OS, and then disappears after completing the deployment. Quick startup of instances improves agility and elasticity significantly, and OS transparency greatly simplifies management tasks for cloud customers. Experimental results have confirmed that BMcast initiated a bare-metal instance 8.6 times faster than image copying, and database performance on BMcast during streaming OS deployment was comparable to that on a stateof-the-art VMM without performing deployment. BMcast incurred zero overhead after de-virtualization.

To prevent data breaches, many organizations deploy full disk encryption to their computers. While OS-based encryption is widely accepted in practical situations, hypervisorbased encryption offers significant advantages such as OS independence and providing more secure environments. Unfortunately, the initial deployment cost of hypervisor-based encryption systems is rarely discussed. In this paper, we present a hypervisor-based encryption scheme that allows instant deployment of full disk encryption into existing systems without disturbing user's activities. To avoid waiting for encryption to be completed, hypervisors perform background encryption that does not incur significant performance penalty on guest OSs by carefully watching guest OS activities and moderating the degree of encryption speed. Our scheme does not require conversion of disk images or modification of OS configurations to install hypervisors by exploiting BitVisor, a thin hypervisor for enforcing security, that can be easily injected to existing systems. Our experimental results on Windows 7 show that application benchmark scores are not significantly affected by the background encryption and the overhead on sequential disk access throughput is at most 24%. The throughput of our background encryption is comparable to that of existing OSbased background encryption systems.

No abstract

To enhance the efficiency of soil information in the field survey, we developed the mobile application called "e-SoilMap" for creating a new user-oriented soil map. This application has the following three unique functions: annotatable map, data sharing over the cloud and offline support for allowing the user to create a high-value-added soil map in their Internet space. Both iOS and Android versions of the mobile application mainly consist of three key components: (1) a map manager, (2) a soil manager and (3) a user manager. The map manager is responsible for displaying background maps to the user. The soil manager displays a soil map and related soil information, which are provided by the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences (NIAES), on the background maps. And the user manager is responsible for creating an annotatable map and sharing the user data in the cloud. The "e-SoilMap" provides soil information to users using location-based spatial query processing and allows the creation of annotatable pins on the soil map. The main target of this application was designed to be a wide variety of technical fields such as agronomic assessment, engineering applications, hydrology and hydrogeologic assessments, environmental assessment and policy decisions.