213 results about "Privilege level" patented technology

A system and method for providing access and / or roaming features on a network system. The network system includes a plurality of wireless and / or wired access points coupled to a network. A portable computing device (PCD) of a user may store identification information which uniquely indicates a network provider of a plurality of possible network providers. The identification information may also or instead indicate an access or privilege level of the user. When the access point receives the identification information from a PCD of a user, the access point may determine the appropriate network provider for the portable computing device using the identification information. Network access may then be provided to the portable computing device through the determined network provider.

A computer system includes a Hypervisor having the highest privilege level; a Primary Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) running with the same or fewer privileges than the Hypervisor; and a Primary Virtual Machine (PVM) without system level privileges and having a Primary operating system (POS) running within it. The POS can be the same operating system that ran on the computer system prior to activation of the Hypervisor. The POS can have hardware drivers used by other components for accessing hardware through the POS. The Hypervisor can have hardware drivers used by other components for accessing hardware through the Hypervisor. Alternatively, the POS can have some hardware drivers used by other components for accessing hardware, and the Hypervisor can have other hardware drivers used by the other components for accessing other hardware through the Hypervisor. The POS can have direct access to at least some real hardware devices.

A micro-virtualization architecture deploys a threat-aware microvisor as a module of a virtualization system configured to facilitate real-time security analysis, including exploit detection and threat intelligence, of operating system processes executing in a memory of a node in a network environment. The micro-virtualization architecture organizes the memory as a user space and kernel space, wherein the microvisor executes in the kernel space of the architecture, while the operating system processes, an operating system kernel, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and its spawned virtual machines (VMs) execute in the user space. Notably, the microvisor executes at the highest privilege level of a central processing unit of the node to virtualize access to kernel resources. The operating system kernel executes under control of the microvisor at a privilege level lower than a highest privilege level of the microvisor. The VMM and its spawned VMs execute at the highest privilege level of the microvisor.

In some embodiments, the invention involves a system to deprivilege components of a virtual machine monitor and enable deprivileged service virtual machines (SVMs) to handle selected trapped events. An embodiment of the invention is a hybrid VMM operating on a platform with hardware virtualization support. The hybrid VMM utilizes features from both hypervisor-based and host-based VMM architectures. In at least one embodiment, the functionality of a traditional VMM is partitioned into a small platform-dependent part called a micro-hypervisor (MH) and one or more platform-independent parts called service virtual machines (SVMs). The micro-hypervisor operates at a higher virtual machine (VM) privilege level than any SVM, while the SVM and other VMs may still have access to any instruction set architecture (ISA) privilege level. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

A system and method for providing access and / or roaming features on a network system. The network system includes a plurality of wireless and / or wired access points coupled to a network. Access points (APs) for the network may be widely distributed in various facilities, such as airports, mass-transit stations, and various businesses. The network may couple to a wide area network, such as the Internet. In one embodiment, a portable computing device (PCD) of a user may store identification information which uniquely indicates a network provider of a plurality of possible network providers. The identification information may also or instead indicate an access or privilege level of the user. Each of the access points are operable to "listen for" or detect identification information associated with numerous different providers. When the access point receives the identification information from a PCD of a user, the access point may determine the appropriate network provider for the portable computing device using the identification information. Network access may then be provided to the portable computing device through the determined network provider. Thus the network system is useable by subscribers of each of the plurality of possible network providers, thereby enabling subscribers to "roam" on various wireless networks, including networks maintained by other providers. The access information may also include an access level which indicates the user's access or privilege level. Thus, the local network may provide various local resources which are available to users having a first access level, and users with a second access level may not be entitled to view or utilize these network resources on the network, but may be simply provided external Internet access.