Design of Function for Tracing Diffusion of Classified Information for IPC on KVM

Abstract

The leaking of information has increased in recent years. To address this problem, we previously proposed a function for tracing the diffusion of classified information in a guest OS using a virtual machine monitor (VMM). This function makes it possible to grasp the location of classified information and detect information leakage without modifying the source codes of the guest OS. The diffusion of classified information is caused by the file operation, child process creation, and inter-process communication (IPC). In a previous study, we implemented the proposed function for a file operation and child process creation excluding IPC using a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM). In this paper, we describe the design of the proposed function for IPC on a KVM without modifying the guest OS. The proposed function traces the local and remote IPCs inside the guest OS from the outside so as to trace the information diffusion. Because IPC with an outside computer might cause an information leakage, tracing the IPCs enables the detection of such a leakage. We also report the evaluation results including the traceability and performance of the proposed function.