Abstract
Hypervisor based memory introspection can greatly enhance the security and trustworthiness of endpoints. The memory introspection logic requires numerous memory address space translations. Those in turn, inevitably, impose a considerable performance penalty. We identified that a significant part of the overall overhead induced by introspection is generated by mappings of guest pages into the virtual memory space of the hypervisor. We show that even if we employ highly efficient software caching, the mapping overhead still remains significant. We propose several new x86 instructions, which can fully eliminate the mapping overhead from memory introspection techniques. We give performance estimates for and argue why we strongly believe the implementation of such instructions to be feasible. The introspection logic also relies on monitoring guest page tables. Here we identified a second important performance overhead source, showing that numerous VM-exits induced by EPT violations are caused by the CPU updating page table A/D bits. We propose a set of simple x86 architectural modifications, that can fully eliminate this overhead.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ARM: ARM Architecture Reference Manual ARMv7-A and ARMv7-R (2014)
BOCHS: The cross-platform IA-32 emulator. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/. Accessed on 24–11–2014
BROMIUM: Bromium vSentry and LAVA products (2014–11-24). http://www.bromium.com/products.html. Accessed on 24–11–2014
Bugnion, E., Devine, S., Rosenblum, M., Sugerman, J., Wang, E.Y.: Bringing virtualization to the x86 architecture with the original vmware workstation. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst 30(4), 12:1–12:51 (2012)
Chang, C.J., Wu, J.J., Hsu, W.C., Liu, P., Yew, P.C.: Efficient memory virtualization for cross-ISA system mode emulation. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE 2014), pp. 117–128. ACM, New York (2014)
Chen, P.M., Noble, B.D.: When virtual is better than real. In: Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS 2001), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2001)
Chennupaty, S., Jiang, H., Sreenivas, A.: Technology Insight: Intel’s Next Generation 14nm Microarchitecture for Client and Server (2014)
Citrix: XenClient XT. The ultimate in multi-level secure local virtual desktops. http://www.citrix.com/products/xenclient/features/editions/xt.html. Accessed on 24–11–2014
Dinaburg, A., Royal, P., Sharif, M., Lee, W.: Ether: Malware analysis via hardware virtualization extensions. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2008), pp. 51–62. ACM, New York (2008)
Dolan-Gavitt, B., Leek, T., Zhivich, M., Giffin, J., Lee, W.: Virtuoso: narrowing the semantic gap in virtual machine introspection. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp. 297–312. IEEE (2011)
Dontu, M., Sahita, R.: Zero-Footprint Guest Memory Introspection from Xen. In: XenProject Developer Summit (2014)
Durham, D.: Mitigating exploits, rootkits and advanced persistent threats. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium on High Performance Chips (Hot Chips 2014), IEEE Technical Committee on Microprocessors and Microcomputers in Cooperation with ACM SIGARCH (2014)
FireEye: Advantage FireEye. Debunking the Myth of Sandbox Security (2013)
Garfinkel, T., Rosenblum, M.: A Virtual Machine Introspection Based Architecture for Intrusion Detection. In: Proceedings of Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, pp. 191–206 (2003)
Hammarlund, P.: 4th Generation Intel Core Processor, codenamed Haswell. In: HotChips (2013)
Intel Corporation: intel\(^{\textregistered }\) 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual (2015). Accessed on 02 Feb 2015
Jain, B., Baig, M.B., Zhang, D., Porter, D.E., Sion, R.: SoK: Introspections on trust and the semantic gap. In: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP 2014), pp. 605–620. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2014)
Jiang, X., Wang, X.: “Out-of-the-box” monitoring of VM-based high-interaction honeypots. In: Kruegel, C., Lippmann, R., Clark, A. (eds.) RAID 2007. LNCS, vol. 4637, pp. 198–218. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Joshi, A., King, S.T., Dunlap, G.W., Chen, P.M.: Detecting past and present intrusions through vulnerability-specific predicates. In: Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2005), pp. 91–104. ACM, New York (2005)
Lampson, B.: Accountability and freedom (2005)
Lampson, B.: Privacy and security: usable security: how to get it. Commun. ACM 52(11), 25–27 (2009)
Lengyel, T., Kittel, T., Webster, G., Torrey, J.: Pitfalls of virtual machine introspection on modern hardware. In: 1st Workshop on Malware Memory Forensics (MMF) (2014)
Lengyel, T.K., Neumann, J., Maresca, S.: Virtual machine introspection in a hybrid honeypot architecture. In: Presented as part of the 5th Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test. USENIX, Berkeley (2012)
LibVMI: Virtual machine introspection tools. http://libvmi.com/. Accessed on 20–06-2015
Ligh, M.H., Case, A., Levy, J., Walters, A.: The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory, 1st edn. Wiley, New York (2014)
Luţaş, A., Lukács, S., Luţaş, D., Coleşa, A.: U-HIPE: hypervisor-based protection of user-mode processes in windows. J. Comput. Virol. Hacking Tech. 9(1), 1–14 (2015)
McAfee: A New Paradigm Shift: Comprehensive Security Beyond the Operating System (2012)
McAfee: McAfee DeepSAFE and Deep Defender (2013)
Mohandas, R., Sahita, R.: Detecting Evasive Malware in Sandbox. In: Focus Security Conference (2014)
Rutkowska, J., Wojtczuk, R.: Qubes OS. http://www.qubes-os.org/. Accessed on 24–11–2014
Sharif, M.I., Lee, W., Cui, W., Lanzi, A.: Secure in-VM monitoring using hardware virtualization. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2009), pp. 477–487. ACM (2009)
Srinivasan, D., Wang, Z., Jiang, X., Xu, D.: Process out-grafting: an efficient “out-of-VM” approach for fine-grained process execution monitoring. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2011), pp. 363–374. ACM, New York (2011)
Vasudevan, A., Chaki, S., Jia, L., McCune, J., Newsome, J., Datta, A.: Design, implementation and verification of an eXtensible and modular hypervisor framework. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP 2013), pp. 430–444. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2013)
Vasudevan, A., McCune, J., Newsome, J., Perrig, A., van Doorn, L.: CARMA: a hardware tamper-resistant isolated execution environment on commodity x86 platforms. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2012), pp. 48–49. ACM, New York (2012)
Vasudevan, A., McCune, J.M., Qu, N., van Doorn, L., Perrig, A.: Requirements for an integrity-protected hypervisor on the x86 hardware virtualized architecture. In: Acquisti, A., Smith, S.W., Sadeghi, A.-R. (eds.) TRUST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6101, pp. 141–165. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Zhang, F., Chen, J., Chen, H., Zang, B.: CloudVisor: retrofitting protection of virtual machines in multi-tenant cloud with nested virtualization. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2011), pp. 203–216. ACM, New York (2011)
Acknowledgments
Adrian Colesa’s work on this paper was supported by the Post-Doctoral Programme POSDRU/159/1.5/S/137516, project co-funded from European Social Fund through the Human Resources Sectorial Operational Program 2007-2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Luţaş, A., Lukács, S., Coleşa, A., Luţaş, D. (2015). Proposed Processor Extensions for Significant Speedup of Hypervisor Memory Introspection. In: Conti, M., Schunter, M., Askoxylakis, I. (eds) Trust and Trustworthy Computing. Trust 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9229. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22845-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22846-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)