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HyperSentry: enabling stealthy in-context measurement of hypervisor integrity

Published: 04 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents HyperSentry, a novel framework to enable integrity measurement of a running hypervisor (or any other highest privileged software layer on a system). Unlike existing solutions for protecting privileged software, HyperSentry does not introduce a higher privileged software layer below the integrity measurement target, which could start another race with malicious attackers in obtaining the highest privilege in the system. Instead, HyperSentry introduces a software component that is properly isolated from the hypervisor to enable stealthy and in-context measurement of the runtime integrity of the hypervisor. While stealthiness is necessary to ensure that a compromised hypervisor does not have a chance to hide the attack traces upon detecting an up-coming measurement, in-context measurement is necessary to retrieve all the needed inputs for a successful integrity measurement.
HyperSentry uses an out-of-band channel (e.g., Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), which is commonly available on server platforms) to trigger the stealthy measurement, and adopts the System Management Mode (SMM) to protect its base code and critical data. A key contribution of HyperSentry is the set of novel techniques that overcome SMM's limitation, providing an integrity measurement agent with (1) the same contextual information available to the hypervisor, (2) completely protected execution, and (3) attestation to its output. To evaluate HyperSentry, we implement a prototype of the framework along with an integrity measurement agent for the Xen hypervisor. Our experimental evaluation shows that HyperSentry is a low-overhead practical solution for real world systems.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CCS '10: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
      October 2010
      782 pages
      ISBN:9781450302456
      DOI:10.1145/1866307
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      Published: 04 October 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. hypervisor integrity
      2. integrity measurement
      3. virtualization

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      • (2023)SSdetector: Secure and Manageable Host-based IDS with SGX and SMM2023 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom60117.2023.00086(539-548)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
      • (2023)HyperPS: A Virtual-Machine Memory Protection Approach Through Hypervisor's Privilege SeparationIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.320020620:4(2925-2938)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2023
      • (2023)Semantic Integrity Measurement of Industrial Control Embedded Devices Based on National Secret Algorithm2023 IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC Workshops)10.1109/ICCCWorkshops57813.2023.10233798(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2023
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      • (2022)Outlier: Enabling Effective Measurement of Hypervisor Code Integrity With Group DetectionIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2021.310490019:6(3686-3698)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
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      • (2022)Smile: Secure Memory Introspection for Live Enclave2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46214.2022.9833714(386-401)Online publication date: May-2022
      • (2022)SecFortress: Securing Hypervisor using Cross-layer Isolation2022 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)10.1109/IPDPS53621.2022.00029(212-222)Online publication date: May-2022
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