TimeCapsule: secure recording of accesses to a protected datastore

  • Authors:
  • Srinivas Krishnan;Fabian Monrose

  • Affiliations:
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Virtual machine security
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present an approach for transparently recording accesses to protected storage. In particular, we provide a framework for data monitoring in a virtualized environment using only the abstractions exposed by the hypervisor. To achieve our goals, we explore techniques for efficiently harvesting application code pages resident in memory at the time disk operations hit the I/O ring, and subsequently apply novel heuristics to overcome the "semantic gap" issue between file-system objects and disk blocks. Our forensic layer records all transactions in a version-based audit log that allows for faithful reconstruction of accesses to the datastore over time. We provide an empirical evaluation of our design that shows our approach to be promising, and very accurate in mapping application to block level access patterns---even under very noisy conditions.