Prevent kernel return-oriented programming attacks using hardware virtualization

Abstract

ROP attack introduced briefly in this paper is a serious threat to compute systems. Kernel ROP attack is great challenge to existing defenses because attackers have system privilege, little prerequisite to mount attacks, and the disability of existing countermeasures against runtime attacks. A method preventing kernel return-oriented programming attack is proposed, which creates a separated secret address space for control data taking advantage of VMM architecture. The secret address space is implemented as a shadow stack on the same host with the target OS facilited by hardware virtualization techniques. The experience result shows the performance overhead in our implementation is about 10% and acceptable in practical. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.