Related papers: Hypervisor-Based Active Data Protection for Integr…
One of the main issues in the OS security is to provide trusted code execution in an untrusted environment. During executing, kernel-mode drivers allocate and process memory data: OS internal structures, users private information, and…
The security of a computer system depends on OS kernel protection. It is crucial to reveal and inspect new attacks on kernel data, as these are used by hackers. The purpose of this paper is to continue research into attacks on dynamically…
Windows OS kernel memory is one of the main targets of cyber-attacks. By launching such attacks, hackers are succeeding in process privilege escalation and tampering with users data by accessing kernel mode memory. This paper considers a…
Windows OS is facing a huge rise in kernel attacks. An overview of popular techniques that result in loading kernel drivers will be presented. One of the key targets of modern threats is disabling and blinding Microsoft Defender, a default…
Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection…
Effectively protecting the Windows OS is a challenging task, since most implementation details are not publicly known. Windows has always been the main target of malwares that have exploited numerous bugs and vulnerabilities. Recent trusted…
Modern operating systems (OSes) have unfettered access to application data, assuming that applications trust them. This assumption, however, is problematic under many scenarios where either the OS provider is not trustworthy or the OS can…
Recent compilers allow a general-purpose program (written in a conventional programming language) that handles private data to be translated into secure distributed implementation of the corresponding functionality. The resulting program is…
Modern malware and spyware platforms attack existing antivirus solutions and even Microsoft PatchGuard. To protect users and business systems new technologies developed by Intel and AMD CPUs may be applied. To deal with the new malware we…
Recent Microsoft security bulletins show that kernel vulnerabilities are becoming more and more important security threats. Despite the pretty extensive security mitigations many of the kernel vulnerabilities are still exploitable.…
AMD SEV is a hardware feature designed for the secure encryption of virtual machines. SEV aims to protect virtual machine memory not only from other malicious guests and physical attackers, but also from a possibly malicious hypervisor.…
Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) are increasingly adopted to protect sensitive workloads from privileged adversaries such as the hypervisor. While they provide strong isolation guarantees, existing CVM architectures lack first-class…
One reason for not adopting cloud services is the required trust in the cloud provider: As they control the hypervisor, any data processed in the system is accessible to them. Full memory encryption for Virtual Machines (VM) protects…
In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…
Current developments in Enterprise Systems observe a paradigm shift, moving the needle from the backend to the edge sectors of those; by distributing data, decentralizing applications and integrating novel components seamlessly to the…
Cloud computing is a convenient model for processing data remotely. However, users must trust their cloud provider with the confidentiality and integrity of the stored and processed data. To increase the protection of virtual machines, AMD…
AMD SEV is a hardware extension for main memory encryption on multi-tenant systems. SEV uses an on-chip coprocessor, the AMD Secure Processor, to transparently encrypt virtual machine memory with individual, ephemeral keys never leaving the…
Privacy-preserving computation techniques like homomorphic encryption (HE) and secure multi-party computation (SMPC) enhance data security by enabling processing on encrypted data. However, the significant computational and CPU-DRAM data…
Hardware-based Trusted execution environments (TEEs) offer an isolation granularity of virtual machine abstraction. They provide confidential VMs (CVMs) that host security-sensitive code and data. AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX enable CVMs and…
Cryptographic algorithm implementations are vulnerable to Cold Boot attacks, which consist in exploiting the persistence of RAM cells across reboots or power down cycles to read the memory contents and recover precious sensitive data. The…