The HitchHiker's Guide to High-Assurance System Observability Protection with Efficient Permission Switches

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04484v1
• Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2024 07:11:44 GMT
• Title: The HitchHiker's Guide to High-Assurance System Observability Protection with Efficient Permission Switches
• Abstract summary: HitchHiker is designed to ensure in-memory protection of batched logs within a short and real-time deadline. The system incurs a geometric mean of less than 6% overhead on diverse real-world programs, improving on the state-of-the-art approach by 61.9--77.5%. Security evaluations and validations show that HitchHiker reduces log protection delay by 93.3--99.3% compared to the state-of-the-art, while reducing TCB by 9.4--26.9X.
• Score: 34.7727114373328
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Protecting system observability records (logs) from compromised OSs has gained significant traction in recent times, with several note-worthy approaches proposed. Unfortunately, none of the proposed approaches achieve high performance with tiny log protection delays. They also leverage risky environments for protection (\eg many use general-purpose hypervisors or TrustZone, which have large TCB and attack surfaces). HitchHiker is an attempt to rectify this problem. The system is designed to ensure (a) in-memory protection of batched logs within a short and configurable real-time deadline by efficient hardware permission switching, and (b) an end-to-end high-assurance environment built upon hardware protection primitives with debloating strategies for secure log protection, persistence, and management. Security evaluations and validations show that HitchHiker reduces log protection delay by 93.3--99.3% compared to the state-of-the-art, while reducing TCB by 9.4--26.9X. Performance evaluations show HitchHiker incurs a geometric mean of less than 6% overhead on diverse real-world programs, improving on the state-of-the-art approach by 61.9--77.5%.

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