Manitou: a layer-below approach to fighting malware

  • Authors:
  • Lionel Litty;David Lie

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Toronto;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Architectural and system support for improving software dependability
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Unbeknownst to many computer users, their machines are running malware. Others are aware that strange software inhabits their machine, but cannot get rid of it. In this paper, we present Manitou, a system that provides users with the ability to assign, track and revoke execution privileges for code, regardless of the integrity and type of operating system the machine is using.Manitou is implemented within a hypervisor and uses the per-page permission bits to ensure that any code contained in an executable page corresponds to authorized code. Manitou authenticates code by taking a cryptographic hash of the content of a page right before executing code contained in that page. Our system guarantees that only authorized code can be run on the system.