The insecurity of modern-day software has created the need for security monitoring applications. Two serious deficiencies are commonly found in these applications. First, the absence of isolation from the system being monitored allows malicious software to tamper with them. Second, the lack of secure and reliable monitoring primitives in the operating system makes them easy to be evaded.
A technique known as Virtual Machine Introspection attempts to solve these problems by leveraging the isolation and mediation properties of full-system virtualization. A problem known as semantic gap, however, occurs as a result of the low-level separation enforced by the hypervisor.
This thesis proposes and investigates novel techniques to overcome the semantic gap, advancing the state-of-the-art on the syntactic and semantic view re-creation for applications that conduct passive and active monitoring of virtual machines.
First, we propose a new technique for reconstructing a syntactic view of the guest OS kernel's heap state by applying a combination of static code and dynamic memory analysis. Our key contribution is the accuracy and completeness of our analysis. We also propose a new technique that allows out-of-VM applications to invoke and securely execute API functions inside the monitored guest's kernel, eliminating the need for the application to know details of the guest's internals. Our key contribution is the ability to overcome the semantic gap in a robust and secure manner. Finally, we propose a new virtualization-based event monitoring technique based on the interception of kernel data modifications. Our key contribution is the ability to monitor operating system events in a general and secure fashion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/44841 |
| Date | 28 June 2012 |
| Creators | Carbone, Martim |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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