A hypervisor-based system for protecting software runtime memory and persistent storage
Prashant Dewan,David M. Durham,Hormuzd M. Khosravi,Men Long,Gayathri Nagabhushan +4 more
- 14 Apr 2008
- pp 828-835
71
TL;DR: The data locker component in the hypervisor is proposed, which prevents the sensitive data of software program in persistent storage from leaking to rootkits or other malware.
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Abstract: An important goal of software security is to ensure sensitive/secret data owned by a program shall be exclusively accessible by the program. An obstacle to such security goal is that modern commodity operating systems (OS) for the sake of speed and flexibility have a unified linear address space--any OS kernel program can access all the linear addresses. As a result, rootkits or malicious system software are able to control the OS virtual address space, harvest the sensitive data used by software programs on the compromised computer, and report the data to remote entities controlled by hackers.In this paper, we present a holistic approach against sophisticated malware. Instead of focusing on the security of various abstraction layers of OS, we utilize the hardware techniques to directly provide the trust services to software programs. Without modifying OS, we leverage the virtual machine monitor technologies to create a lightweight hypervisor for fine-grain software runtime memory protection. As a result, a program's memory could be hidden from other high privilege system software in a single commodity OS. In addition, we propose the data locker component in the hypervisor, which prevents the sensitive data of software program in persistent storage from leaking to rootkits or other malware. For the performance evaluation, the implementation based on hardware-assisted x86 virtualization technology is presented and experimental results are reported.
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Citations
TrustVisor: Efficient TCB Reduction and Attestation
Jonathan M. McCune,Yanlin Li,Ning Qu,Zongwei Zhou,Anupam Datta,Virgil D. Gligor,Adrian Perrig +6 more
- 16 May 2010
TL;DR: TrustVisor is presented, a special-purpose hypervisor that provides code integrity as well as data integrity and secrecy for selected portions of an application that has a very small code base that makes verification feasible.
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Scalable architectural support for trusted software
David Champagne,Ruby B. Lee +1 more
- 01 Apr 2010
TL;DR: Bastion is the first architecture to provide direct hardware protection of the hypervisor from both software and physical attacks, before employing thehypervisor to provide the same protection to security-critical OS and application modules.
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Virtualization: Issues, security threats, and solutions
TL;DR: The security considerations and some associated methodologies by which security breaches can occur are explained, recommendations for how virtualized environments can best be protected are offered, and a set of generalized recommendations that can be applied to achieve secure virtualized implementations are offered.
Secure sensitive data sharing on a big data platform
TL;DR: A proxy re-encryption algorithm based on heterogeneous ciphertext transformation and a user process protection method based on a virtual machine monitor are presented, which provides support for the realization of system functions and protects the security of users' sensitive data effectively and shares these data safely.
105
Patent
System and Method for Enforcing Security Policies in a Virtual Environment
Amit Dang,Preet Mohinder +1 more
- 21 Aug 2009
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a method for intercepting a request associated with an execution of an object (e.g., a kernel module or a binary) in a computer configured to operate in a virtual machine environment.
95
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