Research Article
Building Trustworthy Intrusion Detection through VM Introspection
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/IAS.2007.36, author={Fabrizio Baiardi and Daniele Sgandurra}, title={Building Trustworthy Intrusion Detection through VM Introspection}, proceedings={3rd International ICST Symposium on Information Assurance and Security}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={IAS}, year={2007}, month={9}, keywords={integrity introspection intrusion detection network security system virtual machines}, doi={10.1109/IAS.2007.36} }- Fabrizio Baiardi
Daniele Sgandurra
Year: 2007
Building Trustworthy Intrusion Detection through VM Introspection
IAS
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/IAS.2007.36
Abstract
Psyco-Virt is a high assurance intrusion detection tool that merges host and network intrusion detection technologies with virtual machine introspection. Psyco-Virt architecture includes a cluster of virtual machines, the monitored VMs, which run the OS and applications of interest, and a further VM, the introspection one. Several agents distributed across the monitored VMs execute network and host IDS tools to discover attempted intrusions/attacks on the monitored VMs. The introspection VM makes the detection tools trustworthy by running an introspector and a director to discover any attempt to maliciously modify the kernel, the agents and the IDSes hosted on a monitored VM. On each monitored VM a collector gathers the alerts generated by the agents and forwards them to the director through a control network dedicated to data exchange among the agents and the introspection VM. The director on the introspection VM filters all the alerts and delegates the execution of a proper action to a notifier whenever an intrusion or an attempt to modify the IDSes is detected. In such cases, a monitored VM can either be stopped or frozen and its current state saved in a file for a later, deeper inspection. After describing Psyco-Virt, we discuss some examples of agents and functions using introspection and present preliminary results and performance figures of a first prototype.