A dependability analysis of hardware-assisted polling integrity checking systems

Abstract

Due to performance constraints, host intrusion detection defenses depend on event and polling-based tamper-proof mechanisms to detect security breaches. These defenses monitor the state of critical software components in an attempt to discover any deviations from a pristine or expected state. The rate and type of checks depend can be both periodic and event-based, for instance triggered by hardware events. In this paper, we demonstrate that all software and hardware-assisted defenses that analyze non-contiguous state to infer intrusions are fundamentally vulnerable to a new class of attacks, we call “evasion attacks”. We detail two categories of evasion attacks: directly-intercepting the defense triggering mechanism and indirectly inferring its periodicity. We show that evasion attacks are applicable to a wide-range of protection mechanisms and we analyze their applicability in recent state-of-the-art hardware-assisted protection mechanisms. Finally, we quantify the performance of implemented proof-of-concept prototypes for all of the attacks and suggest potential countermeasures.