Thwarting Memory Disclosure with Efficient Hypervisor-enforced Intra-domain Isolation

Abstract

Exploiting memory disclosure vulnerabilities like the HeartBleed bug may cause arbitrary reading of a victim's memory, leading to leakage of critical secrets such as crypto keys, personal identity and financial information. While isolating code that manipulates critical secrets into an isolated execution environment is a promising countermeasure, existing approaches are either too coarse-grained to prevent intra-domain attacks, or require excessive intervention from low-level software (e.g., hypervisor or OS), or both. Further, few of them are applicable to large-scale software with millions of lines of code. This paper describes a new approach, namely SeCage, which retrofits commodity hardware virtualization extensions to support efficient isolation of sensitive code manipulating critical secrets from the remaining code. SeCage is designed to work under a strong adversary model where a victim application or even the OS may be controlled by the adversary, while supporting large-scale software with small deployment cost. SeCage combines static and dynamic analysis to decompose monolithic software into several compart- ments, each of which may contain different secrets and their corresponding code. Following the idea of separating control and data plane, SeCage retrofits the VMFUNC mechanism and nested paging in Intel processors to transparently provide different memory views for different compartments, while allowing low-cost and transparent invocation across domains without hypervisor intervention.