STOIC: Streaming Operating Systems in the Cloud Riley Collins, Teo Gelles, Benjamin Marks, Alex Simms, and Kevin C. Webb Department of Computer Science, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA frcollin4,tgelles1,bmarks1,asimms1,
[email protected] Abstract—As cloud computing continues to increase in per- Decoupling the OS and files from the hardware has the formance, while simultaneously decreasing in cost, it comes as potential to improve data security. A stolen or misplaced laptop no surprise that traditional computing tasks are frequently being that exclusively relies on the cloud for its file system poses offloaded to cloud services. This paper presents STOIC, a service model for booting and streaming an operating system from no threat of information leakage. Additionally, a user might public cloud infrastructure. Having booted with STOIC, users choose to stream a privacy-preserving OS [5] (e.g., to avoid can perform regular activities with few noticeable differences government censorship), without leaving a trace on her device. between STOIC and more traditional methods of booting an OS. Software demonstration: Many software packages require STOIC makes minimal assumptions about the hardware and more environmental setup than can be provided by traditional software capabilities of the booting client and is compatible with many popular cloud storage providers. We show that STOIC’s “double click to install and run” installers. For example, the file streaming is responsive and demonstrate several use cases in authors of Mininet [6] simplify its distribution by sharing a which streaming an OS is beneficial when compared to alternative preconfigured virtual machine image. Other packages (e.g., file distribution methods.