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

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.