Abstract
Integrity Measurement Mechanisms (IMMs) can be used to detect tampering attacks to integrity of system components, so as to ensure trustworthiness of a system. If an IMM has been compromised, measurement results are untrustworthy. Therefore, IMMs must be protected to provide credible measurement results. In this paper, we propose an isolation mechanism based on the Intel VMX technology to protect an IMM from being tampered with, even if the whole operating system (OS) is untrusted. The isolation mechanism we proposed can be divided into two parts, one of which is a module running inside an OS while the other one is a hypervisor running as the basis of this OS. As an IMM may be attacked by untrusted software in the way of writing its memory, the module of our isolation mechanism is used to modify the access permission of the IMM. Nevertheless, the threat is not disappeared as untrusted software may run in kernel mode and thus they can also modify the access permission of an IMM. Benefiting from the Intel VMX technology, the hypervisor of our isolation mechanism can monitor and stop these abnormal behaviors of untrusted software. To evaluate our approach, we implement a prototype system named VIsolator. Experimental results indicate that it can effectively and efficiently protect an IMM from being tampered with.
The work of this paper was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61070192, 91018008, 60873213), National 863 High-Tech Research Development Program of China (2007AA01Z414), Natural Science Foundation of Beijing (4082018) and Open Project of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing (IIPL-09-006).
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He, L., Li, X., Shi, W., Liang, Z., Liang, B. (2011). VIsolator: An Intel VMX-Based Isolation Mechanism. In: Park, J., Jin, H., Liao, X., Zheng, R. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-centric Computing 2011 and Embedded and Multimedia Computing 2011. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2105-0_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2105-0_24
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