Abstract
Organizations often focus their IT security strategy on protecting the perimeter from outside attacks, but internal attacks can often cause the greatest damage. Version control systems are frequently used in software development, including processes for automated build and deployment. Malicious insider manipulations in a version control system can, for example, lead to a clandestine distribution of software with implanted vulnerabilities, backdoors, or other malicious functionality.
In this paper, we present VMIGuard, a solution that leverages virtual machine introspection (VMI) to detect integrity violations and prevent the propagation of unauthorized changes to a version control system caused by an insider attack. VMIGuard logs metadata about all authenticated modifications, and for each retrieval of version control system content, it verifies on-the-fly if the retrieved content matches the expected state. VMIGuard prevents the delivery of manipulated version control system content and notifies the user about integrity violations. We evaluate VMIGuard based on the open-source version control system git with several scenarios, in which it increases the response time in the worst case of the version control system server by a maximum of only 10%.
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Acknowledgment
This work has been supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the project DINGFEST-EFoVirt and German Research Foundation (DFG) in the project ARADIA.
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Sentanoe, S., Taubmann, B., Reiser, H.P. (2019). VMIGuard: Detecting and Preventing Service Integrity Violations by Malicious Insiders Using Virtual Machine Introspection. In: Askarov, A., Hansen, R., Rafnsson, W. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11875. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35055-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35055-0_17
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