Malicious root-kits modify the in-memory state of programs executing on an endpoint to hide themselves from security software.
Such attacks negatively affect network-based security frameworks that depend on the trustworthiness of endpoint software.
In network access control frameworks this issue is called the lying-endpoint problem, where a compromised endpoint spoofs
software integrity reports to render the framework untrustworthy. We present a novel architecture called Virtualization-enabled
Integrity Services (VIS) to protect the run-time integrity of network-access software in an untrusted environment. We describe
the design of a VIS-protected network access stack, and characterize its performance. We show that a network access stack
running on an existing operating system can be protected using VIS with less than 5% overhead, even when each network packet
causes protection enforcement.
Keywords Network Access Framework - Lying Endpoint - Virtualization - Memory Protections