Improving driver reliability through inlined reference monitor based on virtualization

Abstract

One of the main sources of fault occurrence in commodity operating system are bugs in device drivers. So, one way to improve system security is to improve reliability of drivers by enforcing proper security policies. In this paper a new method to improve driver's reliability by inlined reference monitor (IRM) is proposed. Virtual machine monitor (VMM) is used to enforce IRM. So without any change in the kernel code, additional security layer is added to the system. Thus in addition to improving reliability, the model is still compatible with commodity operating systems.