H-securebox: A hardened memory data protection framework on ARM devices

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

6-2018

Abstract

ARM devices (mobile phone, IoT devices) are getting more popular in our daily life due to the low power consumption and cost. These devices carry a huge number of user's private information, which attracts attackers' attention and increase the security risk. The operating systems (e.g., Android, Linux) works out many memory data protection strategies on user's private information. However, the monolithic OS may contain security vulnerabilities that are exploited by the attacker to get root or even kernel privilege. Once the kernel privilege is obtained by the attacker, all data protection strategies will be gone and user's private information can be taken away. In this paper, we propose a hardened memory data protection framework called H-Securebox to defeat kernel-level memory data stolen attacks. H-Securebox leverages ARM hardware virtualization technique to protect the data on the memory with hypervisor privilege. We designed three types H-Securebox for programing developers to use. Although the attacker may have kernel privilege, she can not touch private data inside H-Securebox, since hypervisor privilege is higher than kernel privilege. With the implementation of H-Securebox system assisting by a tiny hypervisor on Raspberry Pi2 development board, we measure the performance overhead of our system and do the security evaluations. The results positively show that the overhead is negligible and the malicious application with root or kernel privilege can not access the private data protected by our system.

Keywords

ARM hypervisor, Data privacy, Kernel level attack

Discipline

Information Security

Publication

3rd IEEE International Conference on Data Science in Cyberspace, DSC 2018; Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, 2018, June 18-21

Identifier

10.1109/DSC.2018.00053

Publisher

Nanyang Technological University

City or Country

Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/DSC.2018.00053

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