Guardian: Hypervisor as Security Foothold for Personal Computers

• Main Authors: CHENG, Yueqiang, DING, Xuhua
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1970; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2969/viewcontent/guardian_yueqiang.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Personal computers lack of a security foothold to allow the end-users to protect their systems or to mitigate the damage. Existing candidates either rely on a large Trusted Computing Base (TCB) or are too costly to widely deploy for commodity use. To fill this gap, we propose a hypervisor-based security foothold, named as Guardian, for commodity personal computers. We innovate a bootup and shutdown mechanism to achieve both integrity and availability of Guardian. We also propose two security utilities based on Guardian. One is a device monitor which detects malicious manipulation on camera and network adaptors. The other is hyper-firewall whereby Guardian expects incoming and outgoing network packets based on policies specified by the user. We have implemented Guardian (≈ 25K SLOC) and the two utilities (≈ 2.1K SLOC) on a PC with an Intel processor. Our experiments show that Guardian is practical and incurs insignificant overhead to the system.