Hiding File Manipulation of Essential Services by System Call Proxy

Abstract

Security software or logging programs are frequently attacked because they are an obstruction to attackers. Protecting these essential services from attack is crucial to preventing and mitigating damage. Hiding information related to essential services, such as that of the files and processes, can help to deter attacks on these services. This paper proposes a method of hiding file manipulation for essential services. The method makes the files invisible to all services except their corresponding essential services and provides access methods to those files in a virtual machine (VM) environment. In the proposed method, system calls to those files are executed by a proxy process on the other VM. The original system call is not executed in the operating system of the original VM, however, the result of file access is returned to the original process. Thus, the files of essential services are placed on the other VM and other processes on the original VM cannot access to them. Therefore, the proposed method can prevent or deter identification of essential services based on file information monitoring.