Safe Transient Use of Local Storage for VM-Based Mobility

This paper investigates the transient use of free local storage for improving performance in VM-based mobile computing systems. Many such systems boot from a portable storage device to create a "Zero-install" environment on a computer that is borrowed for temporary use. Unfortunately, consumer-grade portable storage devices are optimized for capacity and cost rather than performance, which has been shown to be a critical factor in user experience on VM-based systems. The authors propose a zero-install solution called TransPart that uses the higher-performing local storage of borrowed hardware for performance-critical operations, yet preserves the integrity and privacy of data on that local storage.