Automatic Inference and Enforcement of Kernel Data Structure Invariants

Kernel-level rootkits affect system security by modifying key kernel data structures to achieve a variety of malicious goals. While early rootkits modified control data structures, such as the system call table and values of function pointers, recent work has demonstrated rootkits that maliciously modify non-control data. Prior techniques for rootkit detection fail to identify such rootkits either because they focus solely on detecting control data modifications or because they require elaborate, manually-supplied specifications to detect modifications of non-control data. This paper presents a novel rootkit detection technique that automatically detects rootkits that modify both control and non-control data. The key idea is to externally observe the execution of the kernel during a training period and hypothesize invariants on kernel data structures. These invariants are used as specifications of data structure integrity during an enforcement phase; violation of these invariant...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Arati Baliga, Vinod Ganapathy, Liviu Iftode
• Keywords: ACSAC 2008, Data Structures, Non-control Data, Rootkits, Security Privacy