1,936 research outputs found
SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX
Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the
underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to
software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome
this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code
against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected
enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect
user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices.
This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX,
allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at
the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this,
SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional
hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure
debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses
traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for
protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and
likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a
modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly
promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1
Recommended from our members
A survey of intrusion detection techniques in Cloud
Cloud computing provides scalable, virtualized on-demand services to the end users with greater flexibility and lesser infrastructural investment. These services are provided over the Internet using known networking protocols, standards and formats under the supervision of different managements. Existing bugs and vulnerabilities in underlying technologies and legacy protocols tend to open doors for intrusion. This paper, surveys different intrusions affecting availability, confidentiality and integrity of Cloud resources and services. It examines proposals incorporating Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in Cloud and discusses various types and techniques of IDS and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), and recommends IDS/IPS positioning in Cloud architecture to achieve desired security in the next generation networks
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
TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone
The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an
emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run
simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of
the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing,
processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly
improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported
to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes
are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data
on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be
sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting.
In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy
applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone
technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the
secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for
security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a
lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between
applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime
system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests
for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the
responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped
TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its
performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed
TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201
Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study
Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for
providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting
huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud
deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The
availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no
propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and
third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource
software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and
distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated
and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which
is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of
Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in
deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting
Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the
security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical
guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It
also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of
implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures
- …