Microkernels meet recursive virtual machines

Ford, Bryan; Hibler, Mike; Lepreau, Jay; Tullmann, P.; Back, Godmar; Clawson, Stephen

doi:10.1145/238721.238769

Cited by 89 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Other applications of this idea include virtual machines [15], stackable file systems [23], and preserve compatibility with existing systems by not modifying the network firewalls. A key feature of all these applications is that they preserve compatibility with existing systems by not modifying interfaces of the existing layers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SubVirt: implementing malware with virtual machines

King

Chen

2006

2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06)

297

157

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Attackers and defenders of computer systems both strive to gain complete control over the system. To maximize their control, both attackers and defenders have migrated to low-level, operating system code. In this paper, we assume the perspective of the attacker, who is trying to run malicious software and avoid detection. By assuming this perspective, we hope to help defenders understand and defend against the threat posed by a new class of rootkits.We evaluate a new type of malicious software that gains qualitatively more control over a system. This new type of malware, which we call a virtual-machine based rootkit (VMBR), installs a virtual-machine monitor underneath an existing operating system and hoists the original operating system into a virtual machine. Virtual-machine based rootkits are hard to detect and remove because their state cannot be accessed by software running in the target system. Further, VMBRs support general-purpose malicious services by allowing such services to run in a separate operating system that is protected from the target system. We evaluate this new threat by implementing two proof-of-concept VMBRs. We use our proof-of-concept VMBRs to subvert Windows XP and Linux target systems, and we implement four example malicious services using the VMBR platform. Last, we use what we learn from our proof-of-concept VMBRs to explore ways to defend against this new threat. We discuss possible ways to detect and prevent VMBRs, and we implement a defense strategy suitable for protecting systems against this threat.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SubVirt: implementing malware with virtual machines

King

Chen

2006

2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'06)

297

157

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“…The Fluke OS [13] proposes a recursive virtual machine model, in which a parent can re-implement OS functionality on behalf of its children. Like Denali, Fluke exposes private namespaces through its "state-encapsulation" property.…”

Section: Os Architecturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale and performance in the Denali isolation kernel

Whitaker

Shaw

Gribble

2002

SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev.

149

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This paper describes the Denali isolation kernel, an operating system architecture that safely multiplexes a large number of untrusted Internet services on shared hardware. Denali's goal is to allow new Internet services to be "pushed" into third party infrastructure, relieving Internet service authors from the burden of acquiring and maintaining physical infrastructure. Our isolation kernel exposes a virtual machine abstraction, but unlike conventional virtual machine monitors, Denali does not attempt to emulate the underlying physical architecture precisely, and instead modifies the virtual architecture to gain scale, performance, and simplicity of implementation. In this paper, we first discuss design principles of isolation kernels, and then we describe the design and implementation of Denali. Following this, we present a detailed evaluation of Denali, demonstrating that the overhead of virtualization is small, that our architectural choices are warranted, and that we can successfully scale to more than 10,000 virtual machines on commodity hardware.

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“…However, starting in 1995, that approach gradually evolved, resulting in what became the Flux OS Toolkit, or "OS Kit". Because we were finding our version of Mach [11] too constraining a vehicle in which to prototype new ideas, we developed a series of experimental kernels to try out ideas before designing our Fluke kernel [10]. In doing so, we gradually modularized and formalized the libraries of support code we developed, prototyping the OS Kit along the way.…”

Section: Historical Genesis Of the Os Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our Fluke microkernel [10] puts almost all of the OS Kit to use, and in fact over half of the Fluke kernel is OS Kit code. We used an early version of the OS Kit in MOSS [7], a DOS extender (a small OS kernel that runs on MS-DOS and creates a more complete process environment for 32-bit applications), which is being used in commercial products.…”

Section: Existing Uses Of the Os Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%