A Novel Approach to Address Information Leakage Attacks Based on Machine Virtualization

Abstract

In a traditional non-virtualized computer system the whole software stack is highly vulnerable to security breaches. This is mainly caused by the coexistence of deployed security systems in the same space as the potentially compromised operating system and applications that often run with administrative privileges. In such a structure, compromising, bypassing, disabling, or even subverting deployed security systems become trivial. Machine virtualization provides a powerful abstraction for addressing information security issues. Its isolation, encapsulation, and partitioning properties can be leveraged to reduce computer systems’ susceptibility to security breaches. This paper demonstrates that machine virtualization when employed and synthesized with cryptography would preserve information confidentiality even in an untrusted machine. It presents a novel information security approach called Virtualized Anti-Information Leakage (VAIL). Its objective is to thwart malicious software and insiders’ information leakage attacks on sensitive files after decryption in potentially compromised computer systems. VAIL’s defenses are evaluated against a variety of information leakage attacks including: (1) direct attacks launched on sensitive files from an untrusted virtual machine, and a compromised virtual machine monitor; and (2) indirect attacks exploiting covert storage and timing channels. Based on the security evaluation, it is concluded that VAIL effectively complied with the security requirements, and met its objective.