On the Detectability of Control Flow Using Memory Access Patterns

Abstract

Shielding systems such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization aim to protect a virtual machine from a higher privileged entity such as the hypervisor. A cornerstone of these systems is the ability to protect the memory from unauthorized accesses. Despite this protection mechanism, previous attacks leveraged the control over memory resources to infer control flow of applications running in a shielded system. While previous works focused on a specific target application, there has been no general analysis on how the control flow of a protected application can be inferred. This paper tries to overcome this gap by providing a detailed analysis on the detectability of control flow using memory access patterns. To that end, we do not focus on a specific shielding system or a specific target application, but present a framework which can be applied to different types of shielding systems as well as to different types of attackers. By training a random forest classifier on the memory accesses emitted by syscalls of a shielded entity, we show that it is possible to infer the control flow of shielded entities with a high degree of accuracy.