Instruction-Level Data Isolation for the Kernel on ARM
Yeongpil Cho, Donghyun Kwon, Yunheung Paek · 2017
As more sophisticated services are increasingly offered by the OS kernel on mobile devices, the security and sensitivity of kernel data that they depend on are becoming a critical issue. Data isolation has emerged as a key technique that can address the issue by providing strong protection for sensitive kernel data. However, existing data isolation mechanisms for mobile devices all incur non-negligible performance overhead. We deem that such computational burden would be a serious problem for mobile devices which already suffer from resource poverty. To alleviate this problem, we have developed a new mechanism that enforces data isolation very efficiently on ARM-based machines backed by unique hardware instructions. For evaluation, this instruction-level data isolation mechanism has been implemented in the Android/Linux kernel running on ARM. According to the experiment, it provides a lightweight data isolation capability for security services installed in the kernel.