Title: Design and implementation of hiding method for file manipulation of essential services by system call proxy using virtual machine monitor

Authors: Masaya Sato; Hideo Taniguchi; Toshihiro Yamauchi

Addresses: Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan ' Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan ' Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan

Abstract: Security or system management software is essential for keeping systems secure. To deter attacks on essential services, hiding information related to essential services is helpful. This paper describes the design, the implementation, and the evaluation of a method to make files invisible to all services except their corresponding essential services and provides access methods to those files in a virtual machine (VM). In the proposed method, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) monitors the system call, which invoked by an essential process to access essential files, and requests proxy execution to the proxy process on another VM. The VMM returns the result and skips the execution of the original system call on the protection target VM. Thus, access to essential files by the essential service is skipped on the protection target VM, but the essential service can access the file content.

Keywords: virtual machine monitor; file manipulation; proxy execution; hiding method; essential services; computer security; attack mitigation; attack prevention; system call monitoring; file access.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2019.100007

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2019 Vol.9 No.1, pp.1 - 10

Received: 20 Dec 2018
Accepted: 30 Dec 2018
Published online: 03 Jun 2019 *

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