Trust Evaluation for Embedded Systems Security research challenges identified from an incident network scenario

This paper is about trust establishment and trust evaluations techniques. A short background about trust, trusted computing and security in embedded systems is given. An analysis has been done of an incident network scenario with roaming users and a set of basic security needs has been identified. These needs have been used to derive security requirements for devices and systems, supporting the considered scenario. Using the requirements, a list of major security challenges for future research regarding trust establishment in dynamic networks have been collected and elaboration on some different approaches for future research has been done.This work was supported by the Knowledge foundation and RISE within the ARIES project

Secure Virtualization and Multicore Platforms State-of-the-Art report

SVaM

Thin Hypervisor-Based Security Architectures for Embedded Platforms

Virtualization has grown increasingly popular, thanks to its benefits of isolation, management, and utilization, supported by hardware advances. It is also receiving attention for its potential to support security, through hypervisor-based services and advanced protections supplied to guests. Today, virtualization is even making inroads in the embedded space, and embedded systems, with their security needs, have already started to benefit from virtualization’s security potential. In this thesis, we investigate the possibilities for thin hypervisor-based security on embedded platforms. In addition to significant background study, we present implementation of a low-footprint, thin hypervisor capable of providing security protections to a single FreeRTOS guest kernel on ARM. Backed by performance test results, our hypervisor provides security to a formerly unsecured kernel with minimal performance overhead, and represents a first step in a greater research effort into the security advantages and possibilities of embedded thin hypervisors. Our results show that thin hypervisors are both possible and beneficial even on limited embedded systems, and sets the stage for more advanced investigations, implementations, and security applications in the future

Cyber Situational Awareness Using Live Hypervisor-Based Virtual Machine Introspection

In this research, a compiled memory analysis tool for virtualization (CMAT-V) is developed as a virtual machine introspection (VMI) utility to conduct live analysis during cyber attacks. CMAT-V leverages static memory dump analysis techniques to provide live dynamic system state data. Unlike some VMI applications, CMAT-V bridges the semantic gap using derivation techniques. CMAT-V detects Windows-based operating systems and uses the Microsoft Symbol Server to provide this context to the user. This research demonstrates the usefulness of CMAT-V as a situational awareness tool during cyber attacks, tests the detection of CMAT-V from the guest system level and measures its impact on host performance. During experimental testing, live system state information was successfully extracted from two simultaneously executing virtual machines (VM’s) under four rootkit-based malware attack scenarios. For each malware attack scenario, CMAT-V was able to provide evidence of the attack. Furthermore, data from CMAT-V detection testing did not confirm detection of the presence of CMAT-V’s live memory analysis from the VM itself. This supports the conclusion that CMAT-V does not create uniquely identifiable interference in the VM. Finally, three different benchmark tests reveal an 8% to 12% decrease in the host VM performance while CMAT-V is executing

HyperLink: Virtual Machine Introspection and Memory Forensic Analysis without Kernel Source Code

Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) is an approach to inspecting and analyzing the software running inside a virtual machine from the hypervisor. Similarly, memory forensics analyzes the memory snapshots or dumps to understand the runtime state of a physical or virtual machine. The existing VMI and memory forensic tools rely on up-to-date kernel information of the target operating system (OS) to work properly, which often requires the availability of the kernel source code. This requirement prevents these tools from being widely deployed in real cloud environments. In this paper, we present a VMI tool called HyperLink that partially retrieves running process information from a guest virtual machine without its source code. While current introspection and memory forensic solutions support only one or a limited number of kernel versions of the target OS, HyperLink is a one-for-many introspection and forensic tool, i.e., it supports most, if not all, popular OSes regardless of their versions. We implement both online and offline versions of HyperLink.We validate the efficacy of HyperLink under different versions of Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. For all the OSes we tested, HyperLink can successfully retrieve the process information in one minute or several seconds. Through online and offline analyses, we demonstrate that HyperLink can help users detect real-world kernel rootkits and play an important role in intrusion detection. Due to its version-agnostic property, HyperLink could become the first introspection and forensic tool that works well in autonomic cloud computing environments

EtherAnnotate: a transparent malware analysis tool for integrating dynamic and static examination

Software security researchers commonly reverse engineer and analyze current malicious software (malware) to determine what the latest techniques malicious attackers are utilizing and how to protect computer systems from attack. The most common analysis methods involve examining how the program behaves during execution and interpreting its machine-level instructions. However, modern malicious applications use advanced anti-debugger, anti-virtualization, and code packing techniques to obfuscate the malware\u27s true activities and divert security analysts. Malware analysts currently do not have a simple method for tracing malicious code activity at the instruction-level in a highly undetectable environment. There also lacks a simple method for combining actual run-time register and memory values with statically disassembled code. Combining statically disassembled code with the run-time values found in the memory and registers being accessed would create a new level of analysis possible by combining key aspects of static analysis with dynamic analysis. This thesis presents EtherAnnotate, a new extension to the Xen Ether virtualization framework and the IDA Pro disassembler to aid in the task of malicious software analysis. This new extension consists of two separate components - an enhanced instruction tracer and a graphical annotation and visualization plug-in for IDA Pro. The specialized instruction tracer places a malware binary into a virtualized environment and records the contents of all processor general register values that occur during its execution. The annotation plug-in for IDA Pro interprets the output of the instruction tracer and adds line comments of the register values in addition to visualizing code coverage of all disassembled instructions that were executed during the malware\u27s execution. These two tools can be combined to provide a new level of introspection for advanced malware that was not available with the previous state-of-the-art analysis tools --Abstract, page iii

Simulating Windows-Based Cyber Attacks Using Live Virtual Machine Introspection

Static memory analysis has been proven a valuable technique for digital forensics. However, the memory capture technique halts the system causing the loss of important dynamic system data. As a result, live analysis techniques have emerged to complement static analysis. In this paper, a compiled memory analysis tool for virtualization (CMAT-V) is presented as a virtual machine introspection (VMI) utility to conduct live analysis during simulated cyber attacks. CMAT-V leverages static memory dump analysis techniques to provide live system state awareness. CMAT-V parses an arbitrary memory dump from a simulated guest operating system (OS) to extract user information, network usage, active process information and registry files. Unlike some VMI applications, CMAT-V bridges the semantic gap using derivation techniques. This provides increased operating system compatibility for current and future operating systems. This research demonstrates the usefulness of CMAT-V as a situational awareness tool during simulated cyber attacks and measures the overall performance of CMAT-V

A Survey on Security Aspects of Server Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Significant exploitation and utilization of cloud computing in industry is come with and in the identical time vulnerable by unease regarding protection of data hold by cloud computing providers. One of the penalties of moving data processing and storage off business site is that organizations have fewer controls over their infrastructure. seeing that, cloud service (CS) providers must hope that the CS provider is capable to protect their data and infrastructure from both exterior and domestic attacks. Presently however, such hope can only rely on organizational procedures stated by the CS provider and cannot be remotely verified and validated by an external party. The central distinction between cloud computing and conventional enterprise internal Information Technology services is that the proprietor and the consumer of cloud Information Technology infrastructures are separated in cloud. This transform requires a safety responsibility severance in cloud computing. Cloud service providers (CSP) should safe the services they propose and cannot surpass the customers’ authorities. Virtualization is a buildup utterance in the Information Technology world. With the assure to reduce the ever mounting infrastructure inside data centers connected to other important apprehensions such as ease of use and scalability, virtualization technology has been in advance recognition not only with IT experts yet also among administrators and executives as well. The progressively more growing rate of the approval of this technology has exposed these systems to new protection concerns which in recent history have been unnoticed or merely overlooked. This paper presents an in depth state of art gaze at  present most old server virtualization explanations, as well as a writing study on different security matters found inside this virtualization technology. These problems can be practical to all the existing virtualization technologies accessible with no spotlight on a specific answer. Nevertheless, we do susceptibility investigation of two of the mainstream recognized virtualization answers: VMware ESX and Xen. to conclude, we illustrate some clarifications on how to progress the security of online banking and electronic commerce, using virtualization

Privacy in cloud computing

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2010O paradigma cloud computing está progressivamente a integrar-se nas tecnologias de informação e é também visto por muitos como a próxima grande viragem na indústria da computação. A sua integração significa grandes alterações no modo como olhamos para a segurança dos dados de empresas que decidem confiar informação confidencial aos fornecedores de serviços cloud. Esta alteração implica um nível muito elevado de confiança no fornecedor do serviço. Ao mudar para a cloud, uma empresa relega para o fornecedor do serviço controlo sobre os seus dados, porque estes vão executar em hardware que é propriedade do fornecedor e sobre o qual a empresa não tem qualquer controlo. Este facto irá pesar muito na decisão, de mudar para a cloud, de empresas que tratam informação delicada (p.ex., informação médica ou financeira). Neste trabalho propomos demonstrar de que forma um administrador malicioso, com acesso ao hardware do fornecedor, consegue violar a privacidade dos dados que o utilizador da cloud confiou ao prestador desses serviços. Definimos como objectivo uma análise detalhada de estratégias de ataque que poderão ajudar um administrador malicioso a quebrar a privacidade de clientes da cloud, bem como a eficácia demonstrada contra esses mesmos ataques por mecanismos de protecção já propostos para a cloud. Pretendemos que este trabalho seja capaz de alertar a comunidade científica para a gravidade dos problemas de segurança que actualmente existem na cloud e, que ao mesmo tempo, sirva como motivação para uma acção célere desta, de forma a encontrar soluções para esses problemas.The paradigm of cloud computing is progressively integrating itself in the Information Technology industry and it is also seen by many experts as the next big shift in this industry. This integration implies considerable alterations in the security schemes used to ensure that the privacy of confidential information, companies entrust to the cloud provider, is kept. It also means that the level of trust in the cloud provider must be considerably high. When moving to the cloud, a company relinquishes control over its data to the cloud provider. This happens because, when operating in the cloud, the data is going to execute on top of the hardware owned by the cloud provider and, in this scenario, the client has no control over that hardware. Companies that deal with sensitive data (e.g., medical or financial records) have to weigh the importance of this problem when considering moving their data to the cloud. In this work, we provide a demonstration of how a malicious administrator, with access to the hardware of the cloud provider, is capable of violating the privacy of the data entrusted to the cloud provider by his clients. Our objective is to offer a detailed analysis of attack strategies that can be used by a malicious administrator to break the privacy of cloud clients, as well as the level of efficacy demonstrated by some protection mechanism that have already been proposed for the cloud. We also hope that this work is capable of capturing the attention of the research community to the security problems existent in the cloud and, that at the same time, it works as a motivation factor for a prompt action in order to find solutions for these problems

Robust and secure monitoring and attribution of malicious behaviors

Worldwide computer systems continue to execute malicious software that degrades the systemsâ performance and consumes network capacity by generating high volumes of unwanted traffic. Network-based detectors can effectively identify machines participating in the ongoing attacks by monitoring the traffic to and from the systems. But, network detection alone is not enough; it does not improve the operation of the Internet or the health of other machines connected to the network. We must identify malicious code running on infected systems, participating in global attack networks. This dissertation describes a robust and secure approach that identifies malware present on infected systems based on its undesirable use of network. Our approach, using virtualization, attributes malicious traffic to host-level processes responsible for the traffic. The attribution identifies on-host processes, but malware instances often exhibit parasitic behaviors to subvert the execution of benign processes. We then augment the attribution software with a host-level monitor that detects parasitic behaviors occurring at the user- and kernel-level. User-level parasitic attack detection happens via the system-call interface because it is a non-bypassable interface for user-level processes. Due to the unavailability of one such interface inside the kernel for drivers, we create a new driver monitoring interface inside the kernel to detect parasitic attacks occurring through this interface. Our attribution software relies on a guest kernelâ s data to identify on-host processes. To allow secure attribution, we prevent illegal modifications of critical kernel data from kernel-level malware. Together, our contributions produce a unified research outcome --an improved malicious code identification system for user- and kernel-level malware.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Giffin, Jonathon; Committee Member: Ahamad, Mustaque; Committee Member: Blough, Douglas; Committee Member: Lee, Wenke; Committee Member: Traynor, Patric