HyperSafe: A Lightweight Approach to Provide Lifetime Hypervisor Control-Flow Integrity

— Virtualization is being widely adopted in today’s computing systems. Its unique security advantages in isolating and introspecting commodity OSes as virtual machines (VMs) have enabled a wide spectrum of applications. However, a common, fundamental assumption is the presence of a trustworthy hypervisor. Unfortunately, the large code base of commodity hypervisors and recent successful hypervisor attacks (e.g., VM escape) seriously question the validity of this assumption. In this paper, we present HyperSafe, a lightweight approach that endows existing Type-I bare-metal hypervisors with a unique self-protection capability to provide lifetime controlflow integrity. Specifically, we propose two key techniques. The first one – non-bypassable memory lockdown – reliably protects the hypervisor’s code and static data from being compromised even in the presence of exploitable memory corruption bugs (e.g., buffer overflows), therefore successfully providing hypervisor code integr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SP
• Authors: Zhi Wang, Xuxian Jiang
• Keywords: Hypervisor Code Integrity, Security Privacy, SP 2010, Successful Hypervisor Attacks, Trustworthy Hypervisor