Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Tuesday, March 30, 2010 |
| Time | 11:00 am |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Committee Members: John Hartman Chris Gniady David Lowenthal |
| Speaker | Russell Lewis |
| Title | Master's Thesis Defense |
| Affiliation | Department of Computer Science-University of Arizona |
Bodyguard: Running Protected Applications in Untrusted Operating Systems
ABSTRACT: In this thesis, we present a method to run an application within a commodity operating system without risking either the correctness or privacy of the application should the operating system be compromised. Using a hypervisor, we invisibly intercept all attempts by the operating system to corrupt the state of the application or access its data. We accomplish this first by tracking the current state of the virtual space and verifying all actions by the operating system which might change this state, and second by replacing the contents of physical pages with randomly generated restorable signatures when the operating system attempts to access the contents. The system is sufficiently flexible to allow a binary-unmodified operating system to perform typical tasks such as copy-on-write, fork(), and swap, and sufficiently automatic that the protected application only needs small modifications. Finally, we present automatic methods for adapting a legacy application which are able to provide complete and seamless protection for many applications.