Bromium, Inc.

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Apple Inc.

Rafal Wojtczuk

Rahul Kashyap

J McEnroe Samuel Navaraj

Arun Passi

Baibhav Singh

Ian Pratt

Andrew J Fish

Adrian Taylor

Xeno S Kovah

Corey T Kallenberg

Techniques are disclosed relating to securely booting a computer system. In some embodiments, a bootloader initiates a boot sequence to load an operating system of the computing device and detects firmware of a peripheral device to be executed during the boot process to initialize the peripheral device for use by the computing device. In response to the detecting, the bootloader instantiates a sandbox that isolates the firmware from the bootloader. In various embodiments, the firmware is loaded from an option read-only memory (OROM) included the peripheral device and executed during the boot sequence to initialize the peripheral device. In some embodiments, the bootloader assigns one or more memory address ranges to the firmware, and the sandbox restricts the firmware from accessing memory addresses that are not included in the assigned one or more address ranges.

Boot firmware sandboxing

A software module executes in a first isolated execution environment. The module determines the first environment has caused data to the written to a first clipboard maintained by the first environment. The module consults policy data to determine whether the data should additionally be written to a second clipboard maintained by a second isolated execution environment. The policy data does not allow one or more types of clipboard objects to be written to the second clipboard even if they were written to the first clipboard at the initiation of or approved by a user to prevent the user from introducing a potentially hazardous type of object into the second clipboard. Upon the module determining that the policy data allows the data to be written to the second clipboard, the software module causes the data to written to the second clipboard.

Clipboard hardening

An isolated environment is instantiated in response to receiving a request to execute a process. One or more events occurring within the isolated environment in which the process executes are identified. Whether the actual behavior of the process executing within the isolated environment deviates from an expected behavior of the execution of the process is determined. Only when it is determined that the process deviates from the expected behavior is behavior data, which describes the actual behavior of the process during execution, stored. A determination is then made as to whether the process is compromised by analyzing the behavior data that describes the actual behavior of the process.

Micro-virtual machine forensics and detection

The execution of a process within a virtual machine (VM) may be monitored, and when a trigger event occurs, additional monitoring is initiated, including storing behavior data describing the real-time events taking place inside the VM. This behavior data may then be compared to information about the expected behavior of that type of process in order to determine whether malware has compromised the VM. The trigger event may be analyzed in relation to a set of heuristics, and based on the analysis, a data collection process may be initiated wherein the data comprises information about events occurring in the first virtual machine.

The execution of a process within a VM may be monitored, and when a trigger event occurs, additional monitoring is initiated, including storing behavior data describing the real-time events taking place inside the VM. This behavior data may then be compared to information about the expected behavior of that type of process in order to determine whether malware has compromised the VM.

A software module executes on a first operating system running. The software module determines that the first operating system has caused data to the written to a first clipboard maintained by the first operating system. The software module consults policy data to determine whether the data should additionally be written to a second clipboard maintained by a second operating system. The policy data may only allow the data to be written to the second clipboard if the data was written to the first clipboard at the initiation of or approved by a user. If the software module determines that the policy data allows the data to be written to the second clipboard, then the software module, without human instruction, causes the data to written to the second clipboard.

Approaches for enabling Supervisor Mode Execution Protection (SMEP) for a guest operating system which does not support SMEP. A guest operating system (OS), which does not support SMEP, is executed within a virtual machine. A hypervisor instructs hardware to enable SMEP for the virtual machine executing the guest operating system. When the hypervisor is notified that the hardware has detected the guest operating system instructing a central processing unit (CPU) to execute code stored in virtual memory accessible by user space while the CPU is in supervisor mode, the hypervisor may consult a policy to identify what, if any, responsive action the hypervisor should perform.

Management of supervisor mode execution protection (SMEP) by a hypervisor

The execution of a process within a VM may be monitored, and when a trigger event occurs, additional monitoring is initiated, including storing behavior data describing the real-time events taking place inside the VM. This behavior data may then be compared to information about the expected behavior of that type of process in order to determine whether malware has compromised the VM. The trigger event may be analyzed in relation to a set of heuristics, and based on the analysis, a data collection process may be initiated wherein the data comprises information about events occurring in the first virtual machine.

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Warsaw, Poland

Rafal Wojtczuk