A Virus Detection Framework based on SPMOS

Abstract

Embedded systems have been used in many different areas in which sensitive information communication and storage are needed. This makes security a serious concern in embedded system design, especially in operating system design. At the same time computer virus has been mutating and developing as fast as the upgrading speed of embedded operating system. Even it is possible for some intelligent virus to destroy the anti-virus software process in the memory. The system-on-a-chip technology provides Scratch-Pad Memory(SPM) which is physically isolated with main memory and more efficient than other kind of memories. We construct a demilitarized zone(DMZ) on SPM and design a small OS named SPMOS in the DMZ. A watchdog is contained in GPOS to monitor the events occurred. If an abnormal event is detected, GPOS will trap itself to SPMOS which will invoke anti-virus program. It is a big challenge to switch the two OSes without any virtual layer support. The way to protect SPM showed that the anti-virus detection platform based on SPMOS is secure. Then the experiment results show that the platform is efficient while switching between OSes.