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SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes (2007)
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| Venue: | SOSP'07 |
| Citations: | 217 - 10 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Seshadri07secvisor:a,
author = {Arvind Seshadri and Mark Luk and Ning Qu and Adrian Perrig},
title = {SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes },
year = {2007}
}
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Abstract
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.
Keyphrases
tiny hypervisor commodity os lifetime kernel code integrity kernel mode linux kernel version entire system lifetime system memory chip code size external interface cpu-supported memory virtualization formal verification runtime portion o kernel user-approved code memory virtualization small code size manual audit code injection attack kernel rootkits commodity o kernel memory controller zero-day kernel exploit software memory virtualization small external interface
