Defending against VM rollback attack
Yubin Xia, Yutao Liu, Haibo Chen, Binyu Zang · 2012
Recently it became a hot topic to protect VMs from a compromised or even malicious hypervisor. However, most previous systems are vulnerable to rollback attack, since it is hard to distinguish from normal suspend/resume and migration operations that an IaaS platform usually offers. Some of the previous systems simply disable these features to defend rollback attack, while others heavily need user involvement. In this paper, we propose a new solution to make a balance between security and functionality. By securely logging all the suspend/resume and migration operation inside a small trusted computing base, a user can audit the log to check malicious rollback and constrain the operations on the VMs. The solution considers several practical issues including hardware limitations and minimizing user's interaction, and has been implemented on a recent VM protection system.