SecMon: A Secure Introspection Framework for Hardware Virtualization

Abstract

With the fusion of cloud computing and virtualization technology, system security under virtualization becomes a key point in recent research. As a foundational technology to construct a secure system, virtual machine introspection receives more attention than ever. Almost all of the existing virtual machine monitors take the privileged virtual machine (Domain-0) as the monitoring machine, which ignore the threats brought by Domain-0 because of its huge code base of user-level tools. Besides, para-virtualized machines cannot provide the basic support for popular security applications of Windows operating system. This paper proposes a secure monitoring framework based on hardware virtualization. We use Windows operating system to build a monitoring virtual machine in hardware virtual machine domain, and set up monitoring mechanism in it. In addition, the security of the Windows monitoring machine itself is ensured all through its lifetime-bootstrap and runtime. The experiments show our secure monitoring system performs well in the secure monitoring process. The performance overhead it brings is considered to be acceptable.