Terra: a virtual machine-based platform for trusted computing (2003)

by T Garfinkel, B Pfaff, J Chow, M Rosenblum, D Boneh
Venue:in Proc. ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP
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Short group signatures

by Dan Boneh, Xavier Boyen, Hovav Shacham - In proceedings of CRYPTO ’04, LNCS series , 2004
"... Abstract. We construct a short group signature scheme. Signatures in our scheme are approximately the size of a standard RSA signature with the same security. Security of our group signature is based on the Strong Diffie-Hellman assumption and a new assumption in bilinear groups called the Decision ..."
Abstract - Cited by 386 (19 self) - Add to MetaCart
Abstract. We construct a short group signature scheme. Signatures in our scheme are approximately the size of a standard RSA signature with the same security. Security of our group signature is based on the Strong Diffie-Hellman assumption and a new assumption in bilinear groups called the Decision Linear assumption. We prove security of our system, in the random oracle model, using a variant of the security definition for group signatures recently given by Bellare, Micciancio, and Warinschi. 1

seL4: Formal Verification of an OS Kernel

by Gerwin Klein, Kevin Elphinstone, Gernot Heiser, June Andronick, David Cock, Philip Derrin, Dhammika Elkaduwe, Kai Engelhardt, Rafal Kolanski, Michael Norrish, Thomas Sewell, Harvey Tuch, Simon Winwood - ACM SYMPOSIUM ON OPERATING SYSTEMS PRINCIPLES , 2009
"... Complete formal verification is the only known way to guarantee that a system is free of programming errors. We present our experience in performing the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of ..."
Abstract - Cited by 297 (47 self) - Add to MetaCart
Complete formal verification is the only known way to guarantee that a system is free of programming errors. We present our experience in performing the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of compiler, assembly code, and hardware, and we used a unique design approach that fuses formal and operating systems techniques. To our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of functional correctness of a complete, general-purpose operating-system kernel. Functional correctness means here that the implementation always strictly follows our high-level abstract specification of kernel behaviour. This encompasses traditional design and implementation safety properties such as the kernel will never crash, and it will never perform an unsafe operation. It also proves much more: we can predict precisely how the kernel will behave in every possible situation. seL4, a third-generation microkernel of L4 provenance, comprises 8,700 lines of C code and 600 lines of assembler. Its performance is comparable to other high-performance L4 kernels.
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SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes

by Arvind Seshadri, Mark Luk, Ning Qu, Adrian Perrig - SOSP'07 , 2007
"... We propose SecVisor, a tiny hypervisor that ensures code integrity for commodity OS kernels. In particular, SecVisor ensures that only user-approved code can execute in kernel mode over the entire system lifetime. This protects the kernel against code injection attacks, such as kernel rootkits. SecV ..."
Abstract - Cited by 217 (10 self) - Add to MetaCart
We propose SecVisor, a tiny hypervisor that ensures code integrity for commodity OS kernels. In particular, SecVisor ensures that only user-approved code can execute in kernel mode over the entire system lifetime. This protects the kernel against code injection attacks, such as kernel rootkits. SecVisor can achieve this property even against an attacker who controls everything but the CPU, the memory controller, and system memory chips. Further, SecVisor can even defend against attackers with knowledge of zero-day kernel exploits. Our goal is to make SecVisor amenable to formal verification and manual audit, thereby making it possible to rule out known classes of vulnerabilities. To this end, SecVisor offers small code size and small external interface. We rely on memory virtualization to build SecVisor and implement two versions, one using software memory virtualization and the other using CPU-supported memory virtualization. The code sizes of the runtime portions of these versions are 1739 and 1112 lines, respectively. The size of the external interface for both versions of SecVisor is 2 hypercalls. It is easy to port OS kernels to SecVisor. We port the Linux kernel version 2.6.20 by adding 12 lines and deleting 81 lines, out of a total of approximately 4.3 million lines of code in the kernel.
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Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization

by Jonathan M. McCune, Bryan Parno, Adrian Perrig, Michael K. Reiter, Hiroshi Isozaki - PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACM EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER SYSTEMS (EUROSYS) , 2008
"... We present Flicker, an infrastructure for executing securitysensitive code in complete isolation while trusting as few as 250 lines of additional code. Flicker can also provide meaningful, fine-grained attestation of the code executed (as well as its inputs and outputs) to a remote party. Flicker gu ..."
Abstract - Cited by 183 (19 self) - Add to MetaCart
We present Flicker, an infrastructure for executing securitysensitive code in complete isolation while trusting as few as 250 lines of additional code. Flicker can also provide meaningful, fine-grained attestation of the code executed (as well as its inputs and outputs) to a remote party. Flicker guarantees these properties even if the BIOS, OS and DMAenabled devices are all malicious. Flicker leverages new commodity processors from AMD and Intel and does not require a new OS or VMM. We demonstrate a full implementation of Flicker on an AMD platform and describe our development environment for simplifying the construction of Flicker-enabled code.
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Microreboot - A Technique for Cheap Recovery

by George Candea, George C, Shinichi Kawamoto, Yuichi Fujiki, Armando Fox, Greg Friedman, O Fox , 2004
"... A significant fraction of software failures in large-scale Internet systems are cured by rebooting, even when the exact failure causes are unknown. However, rebooting can be expensive, causing nontrivial service disruption or downtime even when clusters and failover are employed. In this work we sep ..."
Abstract - Cited by 171 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
A significant fraction of software failures in large-scale Internet systems are cured by rebooting, even when the exact failure causes are unknown. However, rebooting can be expensive, causing nontrivial service disruption or downtime even when clusters and failover are employed. In this work we separate process recovery from data recovery to enable microrebooting -- a fine-grain technique for surgically recovering faulty application components, without disturbing the rest of the application.

SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines

by Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, Jacob R. Lorch , 2006
"... Attackers and defenders of computer systems both strive to gain complete control over the system. To maximize their control, both attackers and defenders have migrated to low-level, operating system code. In this paper, we assume the perspective of the attacker, who is trying to run malicious softwa ..."
Abstract - Cited by 153 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
Attackers and defenders of computer systems both strive to gain complete control over the system. To maximize their control, both attackers and defenders have migrated to low-level, operating system code. In this paper, we assume the perspective of the attacker, who is trying to run malicious software and avoid de-tection. By assuming this perspective, we hope to help defenders understand and defend against the threat posed by a new class of rootkits. We evaluate a new type of malicious software that gains qualitatively more control over a system. This new type of malware, which we call a virtual-machine based rootkit (VMBR), installs a virtual-machine mon-itor underneath an existing operating system and hoists the original operating system into a virtual machine. Virtual-machine based rootkits are hard to detect and remove because their state cannot be accessed by soft-ware running in the target system. Further, VMBRs support general-purpose malicious services by allowing such services to run in a separate operating system that is protected from the target system. We evaluate this new threat by implementing two proof-of-concept VMBRs. We use our proof-of-concept VMBRs to sub-vert Windows XP and Linux target systems, and we implement four example malicious services using the VMBR platform. Last, we use what we learn from our proof-of-concept VMBRs to explore ways to defend against this new threat. We discuss possible ways to detect and prevent VMBRs, and we implement a de-fense strategy suitable for protecting systems against this threat. 1.
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Detecting Past and Present Intrusions through Vulnerability-Specific Predicates

by Ashlesha Joshi, Samuel T. King, George W. Dunlap, Peter M. Chen , 2005
"... Most systems contain software with yet-to-be-discovered security vulnerabilities. When a vulnerability is disclosed, administrators face the grim reality that they have been running software which was open to attack. Sites that value availability may be forced to continue running this vulnerable sof ..."
Abstract - Cited by 147 (8 self) - Add to MetaCart
Most systems contain software with yet-to-be-discovered security vulnerabilities. When a vulnerability is disclosed, administrators face the grim reality that they have been running software which was open to attack. Sites that value availability may be forced to continue running this vulnerable software until the accompanying patch has been tested. Our goal is to improve security by detecting intrusions that occurred before the vulnerability was disclosed and by detecting and responding to intrusions that are attempted after the vulnerability is disclosed. We detect when a vulnerability is triggered by executing vulnerability-specific predicates as the system runs or replays. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a system that supports the construction and execution of these vulnerability-specific predicates. Our system, called Intro-Virt, uses virtual-machine introspection to monitor the execution of application and operating system software. Intro-Virt executes predicates over past execution periods by combining virtual-machine introspection with virtual-machine replay. IntroVirt eases the construction of powerful predicates by allowing predicates to run existing target code in the context of the target system, and it uses checkpoints so that predicates can execute target code without perturbing the state of the target system. IntroVirt allows predicates to refresh themselves automatically so they work in the presence of preemptions. We show that vulnerabilityspecific predicates can be written easily for a wide variety of real vulnerabilities, can detect and respond to intrusions over both the past and present time intervals, and add little overhead for most vulnerabilities.

Efficient TCB Reduction and Attestation

by Jonathan M. Mccune, Ning Qu, Yanlin Li, Anupam Datta, Virgil D. Gligor, Adrian Perrig , 2009
"... We develop a special-purpose hypervisor called TrustVisor that facilitates the execution of security-sensitive code in isolation from commodity OSes and applications. TrustVisor provides code and execution integrity as well as data secrecy and integrity for protected code, even in the presence of a ..."
Abstract - Cited by 141 (17 self) - Add to MetaCart
We develop a special-purpose hypervisor called TrustVisor that facilitates the execution of security-sensitive code in isolation from commodity OSes and applications. TrustVisor provides code and execution integrity as well as data secrecy and integrity for protected code, even in the presence of a compromised OS. These strong properties can be attested to a remote verifier. TrustVisor only adds 5306 lines to the TCB (over half of which is for cryptographic operations). TrustVisorimposeslessthan7%overheadinthecommoncase. Thisoverheadislargelytheresult of today’s x86hardware virtualization support. 1
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Stealthy malware detection through VMM-based “out-of-the-box” semantic view reconstruction

by Xuxian Jiang, Xinyuan Wang, Dongyan Xu - IN: COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY (CCS , 2007
"... An alarming trend in malware attacks is that they are armed with stealthy techniques to detect, evade, and subvert malware detection facilities of the victim. On the defensive side, a fundamental limitation of traditional host-based anti-malware systems is that they run inside the very hosts they ar ..."
Abstract - Cited by 139 (18 self) - Add to MetaCart
An alarming trend in malware attacks is that they are armed with stealthy techniques to detect, evade, and subvert malware detection facilities of the victim. On the defensive side, a fundamental limitation of traditional host-based anti-malware systems is that they run inside the very hosts they are protecting (“in the box”), making them vulnerable to counter-detection and subversion by malware. To address this limitation, recent solutions based on virtual machine (VM) technologies advocate placing the malware detection facilities outside of the protected VM (“out of the box”). However, they gain tamper resistance at the cost of losing the native, semantic view of the host which is enjoyed by the “in the box ” approach, thus leading to a technical challenge known as the semantic gap. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of VMwatcher – an “out-of-the-box ” approach that overcomes the semantic gap challenge. A new technique called guest view casting is developed to systematically reconstruct internal semantic views (e.g., files, processes, and kernel modules) of a VM from the outside in a non-intrusive manner. Specifically, the new technique casts semantic definitions of guest OS data structures and functions on virtual machine monitor (VMM)-level VM states, so that the semantic view can be reconstructed. With the semantic gap bridged, we identify two unique malware detection capabilities: (1) view comparison-based malware detection and its demonstration in rootkit detection and (2) “out-of-the-box ” deployment of hostbased anti-malware software with improved detection accuracy and tamper-resistance. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype on both Linux and Windows platforms and our experimental results with real-world malware, including elusive kernel-level rootkits,demonstrate itspracticality and effectiveness.
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vTPM: Virtualizing the trusted platform module

by Stefan Berger, Ramón Cáceres, Kenneth A. Goldman, Ronald Perez, Reiner Sailer, Leendert Doorn - In USENIX Security , 2006
"... We present the design and implementation of a system that enables trusted computing for an unlimited number of virtual machines on a single hardware platform. To this end, we virtualized the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). As a result, the TPM’s secure storage and cryptographic functions are availabl ..."
Abstract - Cited by 121 (4 self) - Add to MetaCart
We present the design and implementation of a system that enables trusted computing for an unlimited number of virtual machines on a single hardware platform. To this end, we virtualized the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). As a result, the TPM’s secure storage and cryptographic functions are available to operating systems and applications running in virtual machines. Our new facility supports higher-level services for establishing trust in virtualized environments, for example remote attestation of software integrity. We implemented the full TPM specification in software and added functions to create and destroy virtual TPM instances. We integrated our software TPM into a hypervisor environment to make TPM functions available to virtual machines. Our virtual TPM supports suspend and resume operations, as well as migration of a virtual TPM instance with its respective virtual machine across platforms. We present four designs for certificate chains to link the virtual TPM to a hardware TPM, with security vs. efficiency trade-offs based on threat models. Finally, we demonstrate a working system by layering an existing integrity measurement application on top of our virtual TPM facility. 1
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