Countering kernel rootkits with lightweight hook protection

Kernel rootkits have posed serious security threats due to their stealthy manner. To hide their presence and activities, many rootkits hijack control flows by modifying control data or hooks in the kernel space. A critical step towards eliminating rootkits is to protect such hooks from being hijacked. However, it remains a challenge because there exist a large number of widely-scattered kernel hooks and many of them could be dynamically allocated from kernel heap and co-located together with other kernel data. In addition, there is a lack of flexible commodity hardware support, leading to the socalled protection granularity gap -- kernel hook protection requires byte-level granularity but commodity hardware only provides page level protection.

To address the above challenges, in this paper, we present HookSafe, a hypervisor-based lightweight system that can protect thousands of kernel hooks in a guest OS from being hijacked. One key observation behind our approach is that a kernel hook, once initialized, may be frequently "read"-accessed, but rarely write"-accessed. As such, we can relocate those kernel hooks to a dedicated page-aligned memory space and then regulate accesses to them with hardware-based page-level protection. We have developed a prototype of HookSafe and used it to protect more than 5,900 kernel hooks in a Linux guest. Our experiments with nine real-world rootkits show that HookSafe can effectively defeat their attempts to hijack kernel hooks. We also show that HookSafe achieves such a large-scale protection with a small overhead (e.g., around 6% slowdown in performance benchmarks).