Virtualization based password protection against malware in untrusted operating systems

• Main Authors: CHENG, Yueqiang, DING, Xuhua
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Password protection; Password-based authentication; Performance loss; Protection mechanisms; Protection systems; User authentication
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1670; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2669/viewcontent/trust12.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Password based authentication remains as the mainstream user authentication method for most web servers, despite its known vulnerability to keylogger attacks. Most existing countermeasures are costly because they require a strong isolation of the browser and the operating system. In this paper, we propose KGuard, a password input protection system. Its security is based on the hardware-based virtualization without safeguarding the browser or OS. A security-conscious user can conveniently and securely activate or deactivate the password protection by using key combinations. We have implemented KGuard and experimented our prototype on Windows with Firefox. The results show that no significant performance loss is induced by our protection mechanism when a user authenticates to commercial web servers.