Croth: Effective Process Protection and Monitoring with Hardware Virtualization

Abstract

With the development of network malicious code, the existing security holes in present systems facilitate data loss. Though protection methods and software are updated day by day, some recent rootkits, that can still invisibly access kernel, make new challenges for the system security. The focal point on system security is how to protect a chosen process on the infected operating system. Process protection and monitoring are becoming more and more important for emerging networks and systems. In this paper, we present a new technique, Croth, which is based on hardware virtualization technology. It introduces a novel mechanism, Cape, that is located in Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). The main work of Cape is to emulate most of the operations originally done by operating system. This primitive offers an additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains, implemented by traditional operating systems and processor architectures. The design and implementation of hiding sensitive data is also presented in this paper. Our design has been fully implemented and used to protect a wide range of legacy process without any modification on Windows operating system. Our experimental result shows that the operating system could not get accurate data while the chosen process is controlled by Croth. It has provided a little performance overhead, however, performance is still acceptable.