KungFuVisor : enabling hypervisor self-defense

Aurelien Wailly (1, 2, 3, 4) , Marc Lacoste (3) , Hervé Debar (1, 2, 4)

1 TSP - RST - Département Réseaux et Services de Télécommunications
2 SAMOVAR - Services répartis, Architectures, MOdélisation, Validation, Administration des Réseaux
3 Orange Labs [Issy les Moulineaux]
4 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Recently, some of the most potent attacks against cloud computing infrastructures target their very foundation: the hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). In each case, the main attack vector is a poorly confined device driver in the virtualization layer, enabling to bypass resource isolation and take complete infrastructure control. Current architectures offer no protection against such attacks. At best, they attempt to contain but do not eradicate the detected threat, usually with static, hard-to-manage defense strategies. This paper proposes an altogether different approach by presenting KungFuVisor, a framework to build self-defending hypervisors. The framework regulates hypervisor protection through several coordinated autonomic security loops which supervise different VMM layers through well-defined hooks. Thus, interactions between a device driver and its VMM environment may be strictly monitored and controlled automatically. The result is a very flexible self-protection architecture, enabling to enforce dynamically a rich spectrum of remediation actions over different parts of the VMM, also facilitating defense strategy administration.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Aurelien Wailly, Marc Lacoste, Hervé Debar. KungFuVisor : enabling hypervisor self-defense. EuroDW '12 : The 6th EuroSys Doctoral Workshop, Apr 2012, Bern, Switzerland. ⟨hal-00738069⟩