ENCBP—An Extended Multi-OSs Remote-Booting Method

With the advance of hardware, software and network, computing paradigm is shifting from mainframe towards pervasive computing. In pervasive computing, users could transparently use any computing service through pervasive infrastructure: even operating systems itself can be acquired through pervasive networks as a service. One implementation method to realize that vision is to remote-booting operating systems over networks, in which an efficient, highly secure and reliable remote-booting method is a key element. Traditional remote-booting methods such as RPL and PXE are not suitable for the network computing for their incapability to support multi-OSs or poor security. NCBP(network-based client boot protocol) is able to support multi-OS, however it is inefficient in terms of booting mono-kernel operating systems such as Linux/Unix and is vulnerable to mishaving such as spoofing. The authors propose ENCBP—an extended NCBP for remote booting multi-OSs. Without compromising the functionality of NCBP, ENCBP improves the remote-booting process by differentiating the kernel types of loaded operating systems. ENCBP also enhances further the security of the remote-booting process by introducing SSFTP—a new and safe file transmission protocol, and relieves the necessity for the optional ROM specified by NCBP. The testing results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.