XFI: Software guards for system address spaces

Abstract

XFI is a comprehensive protection system that offers both flexible access control and fundamental integrity guarantees, at any privilege level and even for legacy code in commodity systems. For this purpose, XFI combines static analysis with inline software guards and a two-stack execution model. We have implemented XFI for Windows on the x86 architecture using binary rewriting and a simple, stand-alone verifier; the implementation’s correctness depends on the verifier, but not on the rewriter. We have applied XFI to software such as device drivers and multimedia codecs. The resulting modules function safely within both kernel and user-mode address spaces, with only modest enforcement overheads.