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A Hypervisor Level Provenance System to Reconstruct Attack Story Caused by Kernel Malware

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Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2017)

Abstract

Provenance of system subjects (e.g., processes) and objects (e.g., files) are very useful for many forensics tasks. In our analysis and comparison of existing Linux provenance tracing systems, we found that most systems assume the Linux kernel to be in the trust base, making these systems vulnerable to kernel level malware. To address this problem, we present HProve, a hypervisor level provenance tracing system to reconstruct kernel malware attack story. It monitors the execution of kernel functions and sensitive objects, and correlates the system subjects and objects to form the causality dependencies for the attacks. We evaluated our prototype on 12 real world kernel malware samples, and the results show that it can correctly identify the provenance behaviors of the kernel malware.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly helped improve this paper. This work is a part of the project supported by Beijing Municipal Science Technology Commission (Z161100002616032), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (4172069) and a joint Ph.D program funded by Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Correspondence to Zhiyu Hao .

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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Wang, C., Ma, S., Zhang, X., Rhee, J., Yun, X., Hao, Z. (2018). A Hypervisor Level Provenance System to Reconstruct Attack Story Caused by Kernel Malware. In: Lin, X., Ghorbani, A., Ren, K., Zhu, S., Zhang, A. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78813-5_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78813-5_42

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78813-5

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