50 years of isolation

The traditional means for isolating applications from each other is via the use of operating system provided “process” abstraction facilities. However, as applications now consist of multiple fine-grained components, the traditional process abstraction model is proving to be insufficient in ensuring this isolation. Statistics indicate that a high percentage of software failure occurs due to propagation of component failures. These observations are further bolstered by the attempts by modern Internet browser application developers, for example, to adopt multi-process architectures in order to increase robustness. Therefore, a fresh look at the available options for isolating program components is necessary and this paper provides an overview of previous and current research on the area

Detecting Hardware-assisted Hypervisor Rootkits within Nested Virtualized Environments

Virtual machine introspection (VMI) is intended to provide a secure and trusted platform from which forensic information can be gathered about the true behavior of malware within a guest. However, it is possible for malware to escape a guest into the host and for hypervisor rootkits, such as BluePill, to stealthily transition a native OS into a virtualized environment. This research examines the effectiveness of selected detection mechanisms against hardware-assisted virtualization rootkits (HAV-R) within a nested virtualized environment. It presents the design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation of a hypervisor rootkit detection system which exploits both processor and translation lookaside buffer-based mechanisms to detect hypervisor rootkits within a variety of nested virtualized systems. It evaluates the effects of different types of virtualization on hypervisor rootkit detection and explores the effectiveness in-guest HAV-R obfuscation efforts. The results provide convincing evidence that the HAV-Rs are detectable in all SVMI scenarios examined, regardless of HAV-R or virtualization type. Also, that the selected detection techniques are effective at detection of HAV-R within nested virtualized environments, and that the type of virtualization implemented in a VMI system has minimal to no effect on HAV-R detection. Finally, it is determined that in-guest obfuscation does not successfully obfuscate the existence of HAV-R

HyBIS: Windows Guest Protection through Advanced Memory Introspection

Effectively protecting the Windows OS is a challenging task, since most implementation details are not publicly known. Windows has always been the main target of malwares that have exploited numerous bugs and vulnerabilities. Recent trusted boot and additional integrity checks have rendered the Windows OS less vulnerable to kernel-level rootkits. Nevertheless, guest Windows Virtual Machines are becoming an increasingly interesting attack target. In this work we introduce and analyze a novel Hypervisor-Based Introspection System (HyBIS) we developed for protecting Windows OSes from malware and rootkits. The HyBIS architecture is motivated and detailed, while targeted experimental results show its effectiveness. Comparison with related work highlights main HyBIS advantages such as: effective semantic introspection, support for 64-bit architectures and for latest Windows (8.x and 10), advanced malware disabling capabilities. We believe the research effort reported here will pave the way to further advances in the security of Windows OSes

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future

KASR: A Reliable and Practical Approach to Attack Surface Reduction of Commodity OS Kernels

Commodity OS kernels have broad attack surfaces due to the large code base and the numerous features such as device drivers. For a real-world use case (e.g., an Apache Server), many kernel services are unused and only a small amount of kernel code is used. Within the used code, a certain part is invoked only at runtime while the rest are executed at startup and/or shutdown phases in the kernel's lifetime run. In this paper, we propose a reliable and practical system, named KASR, which transparently reduces attack surfaces of commodity OS kernels at runtime without requiring their source code. The KASR system, residing in a trusted hypervisor, achieves the attack surface reduction through a two-step approach: (1) reliably depriving unused code of executable permissions, and (2) transparently segmenting used code and selectively activating them. We implement a prototype of KASR on Xen-4.8.2 hypervisor and evaluate its security effectiveness on Linux kernel-4.4.0-87-generic. Our evaluation shows that KASR reduces the kernel attack surface by 64% and trims off 40% of CVE vulnerabilities. Besides, KASR successfully detects and blocks all 6 real-world kernel rootkits. We measure its performance overhead with three benchmark tools (i.e., SPECINT, httperf and bonnie++). The experimental results indicate that KASR imposes less than 1% performance overhead (compared to an unmodified Xen hypervisor) on all the benchmarks.Comment: The work has been accepted at the 21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses 201