Assessing the trustworthiness of drivers

Abstract

Drivers, especially third party drivers, could contain malicious code (e.g., logic bombs) or carefully designed-in vulnerabilities. Generally, it is extremely difficult for static analysis to identify these code and vulnerabilities. Without knowing the exact triggers that cause the execution/exploitation of these code/vulnerabilities, dynamic taint analysis cannot help either. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-brand comparison approach to assess the drivers in a honeypot or testing environment. Through hardware virtualization, we design and deploy diverse-drivers based replicas to compare the runtime behaviour of the drivers developed by different vendors. Whenever the malicious code is executed or vulnerability is exploited, our analysis can capture the evidence of malicious driver behaviour through comparison and difference telling. Evaluation shows that it can faithfully reveal various kernel integrity/confidentiality manipulation and resource starvation attacks launched by compromised drivers, thus to assess the trustworthiness of the evaluated drivers. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.