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SoK: Introspections on Trust and the Semantic Gap
| Citations: | 4 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Jain_sok:introspections,
author = {Bhushan Jain and Mirza Basim Baig and Dongli Zhang and Donald E. Porter and Radu Sion},
title = {SoK: Introspections on Trust and the Semantic Gap},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
(VMI) is assuring security policy enforcement and overall functionality in the presence of an untrustworthy OS. A fundamental obstacle to this goal is the difficulty in accurately extracting semantic meaning from the hypervisor’s hardwarelevel view of a guest OS, called the semantic gap. Over the twelve years since the semantic gap was identified, immense progress has been made in developing powerful VMI tools. Unfortunately, much of this progress has been made at the cost of reintroducing trust into the guest OS, often in direct contradiction to the underlying threat model motivating the introspection. Although this choice is reasonable in some contexts and has facilitated progress, the ultimate goal of reducing the trusted computing base of software systems is best served by a fresh look at the VMI design space. This paper organizes previous work based on the essential design considerations when building a VMI system, and then explains how these design choices dictate the trust model and security properties of the overall system. The paper then observes portions of the VMI design space which have been under-explored, as well as potential adaptations of existing techniques to bridge the semantic gap without trusting the guest OS. Overall, this paper aims to create an essential checkpoint in the broader quest for meaningful trust in virtualized environments through VM introspection. Keywords-VM Introspection, semantic gap, trust. I.
Keyphrases
semantic gap vmi design space threat model direct contradiction design choice overall functionality vmi system keywords-vm introspection essential design consideration vm introspection guest o meaningful trust hypervisor hardwarelevel view previous work security property overall system potential adaptation immense progress security policy enforcement computing base essential checkpoint software system powerful vmi tool fundamental obstacle ultimate goal virtualized environment semantic meaning trust model untrustworthy o fresh look twelve year
