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access icon free Systemic threats to hypervisor non-control data

  • Author(s): Baozeng Ding 1, 2, 3, 4 ; Yeping He 2, 3 ; Yanjun Wu 2, 3 ; Jiageng Yu 1, 2, 3, 4
    • View affiliations
    • Affiliations: 1: Graduate University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People's Republic of China;
      2: National Engineering Research Center for Fundamental Software, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, People's Republic of China;
      3: National Engineering Research Center for Fundamental Software, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing100190, People's Republic of China;
      4: Graduate University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing100049, People's Republic of China
  • Source: Volume 7, Issue 4, December 2013, p. 349 – 354
    DOI:  10.1049/iet-ifs.2012.0252 , Print ISSN 1751-8709, Online ISSN 1751-8717
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 15/08/2012, Accepted 10/12/2012, Revised 05/12/2012, Published

Hypervisors are becoming a widespread virtualisation layer in current computer systems. Recent successful attacks against hypervisors indicate that they face the similar integrity threats as traditional operating systems. Current approaches that secure hypervisors mainly focus on code or control-data integrity, without paying attention to non-control data integrity. In this study the authors construct attacks that target hypervisor non-control data to demonstrate which types of data within the Xen hypervisor are critical to system security. It shows privilege, resource utilisation and security policy related data are vulnerable to return-oriented programming or DMA attacks. By modifying their values from one to another, the whole system's performance will be affected. By discussing current approaches that secure hypervisors, which are not suitable for non-control data, the work is to motivate new innovation in this area to protect them.

Inspec keywords: security of data; virtualisation; data integrity

Other keywords: hypervisor noncontrol data; data integrity; virtualisation layer; return-oriented programming; Xen hypervisor; secure hypervisors; systemic threats; DMA attacks; computer systems; system security

Subjects: Data security

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