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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…
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…
One of the main issues in the OS security is providing trusted code execution in an untrusted environment. During executing, kernel-mode drivers dynamically allocate memory to store and process their data: Windows core kernel structures,…
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…
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…
The security of applications hinges on the trustworthiness of the operating system, as applications rely on the OS to protect code and data. As a result, multiple protections for safeguarding the integrity of kernel code and data are being…
Malware and cheat developers use fileless execution techniques to evade traditional, signature-based security products. These methods include various types of manual mapping, module stomping, and threadless injection which work entirely…
Application compartmentalization and privilege separation are our primary weapons against ever-increasing security threats and privacy concerns on connected devices. Despite significant progress, it is still challenging to privilege…
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) introduced new instructions to switch the processor to enclave mode which protects it from introspection. While the enclave mode strongly protects the memory and the state of the processor, it cannot…
In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware. Additionally, in a cloud scenario it is crucial that the hypervisor isolates tenants from other tenants that are co-located on…
Modern GPU applications, such as machine learning (ML), can only partially utilize GPUs, leading to GPU underutilization in cloud environments. Sharing GPUs across multiple applications from different tenants can improve resource…
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…
Over the last years, security kernels have played a promising role in reshaping the landscape of platform security on today's ubiquitous embedded devices. Security kernels, such as separation kernels, enable constructing high-assurance…
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…
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…
Confidential computing safeguards sensitive computations from untrusted clouds, with Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) providing a secure environment for guest OS. However, CVMs often come with large and vulnerable operating system…
Existing anti-malware software and reverse engineering toolkits struggle with stealthy sub-OS rootkits due to limitations of run-time kernel-level monitoring. A malicious kernel-level driver can bypass OS-level anti-virus mechanisms easily.…
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…
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…
Application size and complexity are the underlying cause of numerous security vulnerabilities in code. In order to mitigate the risks arising from such vulnerabilities, various techniques have been proposed to isolate the execution of…