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Trustworthy Isolation of DMA Enabled Devices

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Information Systems Security (ICISS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11952))

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Abstract

We present a mechanism to trustworthy isolate I/O devices with Direct Memory Access (DMA), which ensures that an isolated I/O device cannot access sensitive memory regions. As a demonstrating platform, we use the Network Interface Controller (NIC) of an embedded system. We develop a run-time monitor that forces NIC reconfigurations, defined by untrusted software, to satisfy a security rule. We formalized the NIC in the HOL4 interactive theorem prover and we verified the design of the isolation mechanism. The verification is based on an invariant that is proved to be preserved by all NIC operations and that ensures that all memory accesses address allowed memory regions only. We demonstrate our approach by extending an existing Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) with the monitor. The resulting platform prevents code injection in a connected and untrusted Linux (The HOL4 proofs and the source code of the monitor are published at https://github.com/kth-step/NIC-formalization-monitor.).

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Acknowledgements

Work partially supported by the TrustFull project financed by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonas Haglund & Roberto Guanciale

Authors
  1. Jonas Haglund
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  2. Roberto Guanciale
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jonas Haglund or Roberto Guanciale .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken, Germany

    Deepak Garg

  2. Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, Hyderabad, India

    N. V. Narendra Kumar

  3. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

    Rudrapatna K. Shyamasundar

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Haglund, J., Guanciale, R. (2019). Trustworthy Isolation of DMA Enabled Devices. In: Garg, D., Kumar, N., Shyamasundar, R. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11952. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36945-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36945-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36944-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36945-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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