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Tappan Zee (north) bridge: mining memory accesses for introspection

Published: 04 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to introspect into the behavior of software at runtime is crucial for many security-related tasks, such as virtual machine-based intrusion detection and low-artifact malware analysis. Although some progress has been made in this task by automatically creating programs that can passively retrieve kernel-level information, two key challenges remain. First, it is currently difficult to extract useful information from user-level applications, such as web browsers. Second, discovering points within the OS and applications to hook for active monitoring is still an entirely manual process. In this paper we propose a set of techniques to mine the memory accesses made by an operating system and its applications to locate useful places to deploy active monitoring, which we call tap points. We demonstrate the efficacy of our techniques by finding tap points for useful introspection tasks such as finding SSL keys and monitoring web browser activity on five different operating systems (Windows 7, Linux, FreeBSD, Minix and Haiku) and two processor architectures (ARM and x86).

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  • (2024)X-Ray-TLS: Transparent Decryption of TLS Sessions by Extracting Session Keys from MemoryProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3637654(35-48)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Callee: Recovering Call Graphs for Binaries with Transfer and Contrastive Learning2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46215.2023.10179482(2357-2374)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)Natch: Detecting Attack Surface for Multi-Service Systems with Hybrid Introspection2023 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C60940.2023.00023(176-185)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
    November 2013
    1530 pages
    ISBN:9781450324779
    DOI:10.1145/2508859
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 04 November 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. active monitoring
    2. introspection
    3. reverse engineering

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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    View all
    • (2024)X-Ray-TLS: Transparent Decryption of TLS Sessions by Extracting Session Keys from MemoryProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3637654(35-48)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Callee: Recovering Call Graphs for Binaries with Transfer and Contrastive Learning2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46215.2023.10179482(2357-2374)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2023)Natch: Detecting Attack Surface for Multi-Service Systems with Hybrid Introspection2023 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C60940.2023.00023(176-185)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Whiteboxgrind – Automated Analysis of Whitebox CryptographyConstructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design10.1007/978-3-031-29497-6_11(221-240)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2023
    • (2022)LibAFLProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3548606.3560602(1051-1065)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Katana: Robust, Automated, Binary-Only Forensic Analysis of Linux Memory SnapshotsProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3545948.3545980(214-231)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Multi-layered Monitoring for Virtual MachinesSystem Dependability and Analytics10.1007/978-3-031-02063-6_6(99-140)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2022
    • (2021)Malware: The Never-Ending Arm RaceOpen Journal of Cybersecurity10.46723/ojc.1.1.3(1-25)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2021
    • (2021)CloudSkulk: A Nested Virtual Machine Based Rootkit and Its Detection2021 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)10.1109/DSN48987.2021.00047(350-362)Online publication date: Jun-2021
    • (2020)Towards Unsupervised Introspection of Containerized ApplicationProceedings of the 2020 10th International Conference on Communication and Network Security10.1145/3442520.3442530(42-51)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2020
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