Mcafee, Inc.

Vivek Srivastava

Preet Mohinder

Amit Dang

Suman Saraf

Sharad Kumar Agrawal

A system and method for rootkit protection in a hypervisor environment includes modules for creating a soft whitelist having entries corresponding to each guest kernel page of a guest operating system in a hypervisor environment, wherein each entry is a duplicate page of the corresponding guest kernel page, generating a page fault when a process attempts to access a guest kernel page, and redirecting the process to the corresponding duplicate page. If the page fault is a data page fault, the method includes fixing the page fault, and marking a page table entry corresponding to the guest kernel page as non-executable and writeable. If the page fault is an instruction page fault, the method includes marking a page table entry corresponding to the guest kernel page as read-only. Redirecting changing a machine page frame number in a shadow page table of the hypervisor to point to the corresponding duplicate page.

System and method for kernel rootkit protection in a hypervisor environment

A system and method in one embodiment includes modules for creating a soft whitelist having entries corresponding to each guest kernel page in a guest operating system in a hypervisor environment, generating a page fault when an access attempt is made to a guest kernel page, fixing the page fault to allow access and execution if the guest kernel page corresponds to one of the entries in the soft whitelist, and denying execution if the guest kernel page does not correspond to any of the entries in the soft whitelist. If the page fault is an instruction page fault, and the guest kernel page corresponds to one of the entries in the soft whitelist, the method includes marking the guest kernel page as read-only and executable. The soft whitelist includes a hash of machine page frame numbers corresponding to virtual addresses of each guest kernel page.

A method includes creating a soft whitelist having an entry corresponding to a first guest kernel page in a guest operating system (OS) in a hypervisor environment including a hypervisor. The method also includes receiving an access attempt to a second guest kernel page, and generating a page fault when the access attempt is made to the second guest kernel page. In addition, the method includes determining that the second guest kernel page does not correspond to the entry in the soft whitelist, and denying an execution of the second guest kernel page if the second guest kernel page does not correspond to the entry in the soft whitelist.

Embodiment of the invention provide a reverse name lookup function for providing an absolute path name or file name and absolute path name to the file name parent directory based on a vnode reference, NFS file handle reference, or file identifier reference associated with a computer virtual file system. A method in accordance with the invention comprises populating a table structure with vnodes, names, and absolute path information associated with the vnodes. The table structure and information are sufficient to generate an absolute path name and file name for each vnode. The table structure also includes entries for file identifiers, names, and associated absolute path information associated with the file identifiers. This information is sufficient to generate an absolute path name for each file identifier. The table is populated by hooking virtual file system function calls including the vnode name lookup function and the vnode inactive function. The table is populated with the file identifier entries by hooking the vnode inactive function.

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Gurgaon, India

Vivek Srivastava