KI-Mon: A Hardware-assisted Event-triggered Monitoring Platform for Mutable Kernel Object

Abstract

Kernel rootkits undermine the integrity of system by manipulating its operating system kernel. External hardware-based monitors can serve as a root of trust that is resilient to rootkit attacks. The existing external hardware-based approaches lack an event-triggered verification scheme for mutable kernel objects. To address the issue, we present KI-Mon, a hardware-based platform for event-triggered kernel integrity monitor. A refined form of bus traffic monitoring efficiently verifies the update values of the objects, and callback verification routines can be programmed and executed for a designated event space. We have built a KI-Mon prototype to demonstrate the efficacy of KI-Mon's event-triggered mechanism in terms of performance overhead for the monitored host system and the processor usage of the KI-Mon processor.