DriverGuard: A fine-grained protection on I/O flow

• Main Authors: CHENG, Yueqiang, DING, Xuhua, DENG, Robert H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1418; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2417/viewcontent/Cheng2011_Chapter_DriverGuardAFine_Grained_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Most commodity peripheral devices and their drivers are geared to achieve high performance with security functions being opted out. The absence of security measures invites attacks on the I/O data and consequently threats those applications feeding on them, such as biometric authentication. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of DriverGuard, a hypervisor based protection mechanism which dynamically shields I/O flows such that I/O data are not exposed to the malicious kernel. Our design leverages a composite of cryptographic and virtualization techniques to achieve fine-grained protection. DriverGuard is lightweight as it only needs to protect around 2% of the driver code’s execution. We have tested DriverGuard with three input devices and two output devices. The experiments show that DriverGuard induces negligible overhead to the applications.