Design and implementation of an extended reference monitor for trusted operating systems

Abstract

Conventional access control schemes have supported confidentiality and integrity acknowledging the necessary organizational security policy in operating systems. However, many runtime attacks in operating systems involve behavioral semantics, indicating that attacks should be seen as a sequence of access operations. Ironically these attacks are legitimate under any access control policy. This is due to the lack of behavioral dimension in security enforcement. We propose an extended reference monitor to include this dimension. Our method is based on safety property specification on system call sequences. The reference monitor checks the trace at runtime for behavior control in Linux operating system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.