Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
"• Overshadow: A Virtualization-Based Approach to Retrofitting Protection in Commodity Operating Systems". M. Chen, P. Subrahmanyam, C. Waldspurger, E. C. Lewis, Tal Garfinkel, D. Boneh, D. Ports, and J. Dwoskin (eds.), ASPLOS, 2008.

Abstract
Commodity operating systems entrusted with securing sensitive data are remarkably large and complex, and consequently, frequently prone to compromise. To address this limitation, we introduce a virtual-machine-based system called Overshadow that protects the privacy and integrity of application data, even in the event of a total OS compromise. Overshadow presents an application with a normal view of its resources, but the OS with an encrypted view. This allows the operating system to carry out the complex task of managing an application’s resources, without allowing it to read or modify them. Thus, Overshadow offers a last line of defense for application data. Overshadow builds on multi-shadowing, a novel mechanism that presents different views of “physical” memory, depending on the context performing the access. This primitive offers an additional dimension of protection beyond the hierarchical protection domains implemented by traditional operating systems and processor architectures. We present the design and implementation of Overshadow and show how its new protection semantics can be integrated with existing systems. Our design has been fully implemented and used to protect a wide range of unmodified legacy applications running on an unmodified Linux operating system. We evaluate the performance of our implementation, demonstrating that this approach is practical.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.elewis.net/papers/asplos2008.pdf

• HTML

   <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/587.html"
  ><i>�	Overshadow: A
  Virtualization-Based Approach to Retrofitting Protection in
  Commodity Operating Systems</i></a>, M. Chen, P.
  Subrahmanyam, C. Waldspurger, E. C. Lewis, Tal Garfinkel, D.
  Boneh, D. Ports, and J. Dwoskin (eds.), ASPLOS, 2008.

• Plain text

   "�	Overshadow: A Virtualization-Based
  Approach to Retrofitting Protection in Commodity Operating
  Systems". M. Chen, P. Subrahmanyam, C. Waldspurger, E.
  C. Lewis, Tal Garfinkel, D. Boneh, D. Ports, and J. Dwoskin
  (eds.), ASPLOS, 2008.

• BibTeX

  @proceedings{ChenSubrahmanyamWaldspurgerLewisGarfinkelBonehPorts08_OvershadowVirtualizationBasedApproachToRetrofitting,
      title = {�	Overshadow: A Virtualization-Based Approach to
                Retrofitting Protection in Commodity Operating
                Systems},
      editor = {M. Chen, P. Subrahmanyam, C. Waldspurger, E. C.
                Lewis, Tal Garfinkel, D. Boneh, D. Ports, and J.
                Dwoskin},
      organization = {ASPLOS},
      year = {2008},
      abstract = {Commodity operating systems entrusted with
                securing sensitive data are remarkably large and
                complex, and consequently, frequently prone to
                compromise. To address this limitation, we
                introduce a virtual-machine-based system called
                Overshadow that protects the privacy and integrity
                of application data, even in the event of a total
                OS compromise. Overshadow presents an application
                with a normal view of its resources, but the OS
                with an encrypted view. This allows the operating
                system to carry out the complex task of managing
                an application�s resources, without allowing it
                to read or modify them. Thus, Overshadow offers a
                last line of defense for application data.
                Overshadow builds on multi-shadowing, a novel
                mechanism that presents different views of
                �physical� memory, depending on the context
                performing the access. This primitive offers an
                additional dimension of protection beyond the
                hierarchical protection domains implemented by
                traditional operating systems and processor
                architectures. We present the design and
                implementation of Overshadow and show how its new
                protection semantics can be integrated with
                existing systems. Our design has been fully
                implemented and used to protect a wide range of
                unmodified legacy applications running on an
                unmodified Linux operating system. We evaluate the
                performance of our implementation, demonstrating
                that this approach is practical.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/587.html}
  }
  

Posted by Jessica Gamble on 13 Mar 2009.
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