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Towards a tamper-resistant kernel rootkit detector

Published: 11 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

A variety of tools and architectures have been developed to detect security violations to Operating System kernels. However, they all have fundamental flaw in the design so that they fail to discover kernel-level attack. Few hardware solutions have been proposed to address the outstanding problem, but unfortunately they are not widely accepted. This paper presents a software-based method to detect intrusion to kernel. The proposed tool named XenKIMONO, which is based on Xen Virtual Machine, is able to detect many kernel rootkits in virtual machines with small penalty to the system's performance. In contrast with the traditional approaches, XenKIMONO is isolated with the kernel being monitored, thus it can still function correctly even if the observed kernel is compromised. Moreover, XenKIMONO is flexible and easy to deploy as it absolutely does not require any modification to the monitored systems.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing
March 2007
1688 pages
ISBN:1595934804
DOI:10.1145/1244002
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 March 2007

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Author Tags

  1. Linux
  2. Xen virtual machine
  3. intrusion detection
  4. kernel rootkit

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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  • (2021)TPE: A Hardware-Based TLB Profiling Expert for Workload ReconstructionIEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems10.1109/JETCAS.2021.307744211:2(292-305)Online publication date: Jun-2021
  • (2020)Position Paper: Consider Hardware-enhanced Defenses for Rootkit AttacksProceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy10.1145/3458903.3458909(1-9)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2020
  • (2020)Object Scanning of Windows Kernel Driver Based on Pool Tag Quick ScanningXibei Gongye Daxue Xuebao/Journal of Northwestern Polytechnical University10.1051/jnwpu/2019375104437:5(1044-1052)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2020
  • (2019)High-Performance Memory Snapshotting for Real-Time, Consistent, Hypervisor-Based MonitorsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2018.2805904(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2018)The trusted virtual machine cluster construction method based on particle wave equationInternational Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing10.5555/3292963.329297115:2(163-174)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
  • (2017)The Evolution of Process Hiding Techniques in Malware - Current Threats and Possible CountermeasuresJournal of Information Processing10.2197/ipsjjip.25.86625(866-874)Online publication date: 2017
  • (2017)On the Impact of Kernel Code Vulnerabilities in IoT Devices2017 International Conference on Software Security and Assurance (ICSSA)10.1109/ICSSA.2017.16(1-5)Online publication date: Jul-2017
  • (2016)Evolution of Attacks, Threat Models, and Solutions for Virtualized SystemsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/285612648:3(1-38)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2016
  • (2016)CloudMonIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2016.256080965:12(3787-3793)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2016
  • (2016)Hardware-based workload forensics: Process reconstruction via TLB monitoring2016 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)10.1109/HST.2016.7495577(167-172)Online publication date: May-2016
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