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RegVault: hardware assisted selective data randomization for operating system kernels

Published: 23 August 2022 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents RegVault, a hardware-assisted lightweight data randomization scheme for OS kernels. RegVault introduces novel cryptographically strong hardware primitives to protect both the confidentiality and integrity of register-grained data. RegVault leverages annotations to mark sensitive data and instruments their loads and stores automatically. Moreover, RegVault also introduces new techniques to protect the interrupt context and safeguard the sensitive data spilling. We implement a prototype of RegVault by extending RISC-V architecture to protect six types of sensitive data in Linux kernel. Our evaluations show that RegVault can defend against the kernel data attacks effectively with a minimal performance overhead.

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  • (2024)RECAST: Mitigating Conflict-Based Cache Attacks Through Fine-Grained Dynamic MappingIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.336886219(3758-3771)Online publication date: 2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
DAC '22: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
July 2022
1462 pages
ISBN:9781450391429
DOI:10.1145/3489517
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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Published: 23 August 2022

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)AutoOSProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning10.5555/3692070.3692362(7511-7525)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2024
  • (2024)uMMU: Securing Data Confidentiality with Unobservable Memory SubsystemProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690340(2993-3007)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
  • (2024)RECAST: Mitigating Conflict-Based Cache Attacks Through Fine-Grained Dynamic MappingIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.336886219(3758-3771)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2023)RegGuardComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2023.103213129:COnline publication date: 1-Jun-2023

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