Kernel Malware Research Articles

HProve: A Hypervisor Level Provenance System to Reconstruct Attack Story Caused by Kernel Malware

Provenance of system subjects (e.g., processes) and objects (e.g., files) are very useful for many forensics tasks. In our analysis and comparison of existing Linux provenance tracing systems, we found that most systems assume the Linux kernel to be in the trust base, making these systems vulnerable

Exception‐oriented programming: retrofitting code‐reuse attacks to construct kernel malware

Commodity operating system kernels are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks due to the large code base and broad attack surface. Mitigation mechanisms such as code signing, W⊕X, and code integrity protection have raised the bar for kernel security. In turn, attack mechanisms have also become increasingly advanced. They have evolved from simple injection of malicious code into more sophisticated code-reuse attacks [e.g. return-oriented programming (ROP)]. In this study, the authors describe exception-oriented programming (EOP), a novel code-reuse method to construct kernel malware. Unlike previous ROP that can only reuse a limited part of existing code (gadgets), EOP is able to reuse any instruction in existing code and chain the instructions in any order to generate malicious programmes. As a result, EOP can provide the attackers with more powerful capabilities and less complexity for building kernel malware.

Data-Centric OS Kernel Malware Characterization

Traditional malware detection and analysis approaches have been focusing on code-centric aspects of malicious programs, such as detection of the injection of malicious code or matching malicious code sequences. However, modern malware has been employing advanced strategies, such as reusing legitimate code or obfuscating malware code to circumvent the detection. As a new perspective to complement code-centric approaches, we propose a data-centric OS kernel malware characterization architecture that detects and characterizes malware attacks based on the properties of data objects manipulated during the attacks. This framework consists of two system components with novel features: First, a runtime kernel object mapping system which has an un-tampered view of kernel data objects resistant to manipulation by malware. This view is effective at detecting a class of malware that hides dynamic data objects. Second, this framework consists of a new kernel malware detection approach that generates malware signatures based on the data access patterns specific to malware attacks. This approach has an extended coverage that detects not only the malware with the signatures, but also the malware variants that share the attack patterns by modeling the low level data access behaviors as signatures. Our experiments against a variety of real-world kernel rootkits demonstrate the effectiveness of data-centric malware signatures.

EXTERIOR

This paper presents EXTERIOR, a dual-VM architecture based external shell that can be used for trusted, timely out-of-VM management of guest-OS such as introspection, configuration, and recovery. Inspired by recent advances in virtual machine introspection (VMI), EXTERIOR leverages an isolated, secure virtual machine (SVM) to introspect the kernel state of a guest virtual machine (GVM). However, it goes far beyond the read-only capability of the traditional VMI, and can perform automatic, fine-grained guest-OS writable operations. The key idea of EXTERIOR is to use a dual-VM architecture in which a SVM runs a kernel identical to that of the GVM to create the necessary environment for a running process (e.g., rmmod, kill), and dynamically and transparently redirect and update the memory state at the VMM layer from SVM to GVM, thereby achieving the same effect in terms of kernel state updates of running the same trusted in-VM program inside the shell of GVM. A proof-of-concept EXTERIOR has been implemented. The experimental results show that EXTERIOR can be used for a timely administration of guest-OS, including introspection and (re)configuration of the guest-OS state and timely response of kernel malware intrusions, without any user account in the guest-OS.