Hooksafe is a
hypervisor
A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...
-based lightweight system that protects an operating system's kernel hooks from
rootkit
A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) and often masks its existence or the exis ...
attacks.
It prevents thousands of kernel hooks in the guest operating system from being hijacked. This is achieved by making a shadow copy of all the kernel hooks at one central place and adding an indirection layer on it to regulate attempts to access the hooks. A prototype of Hooksafe was used on a Linux guest and protected nearly 6000 kernel hooks.
It focuses on protecting
kernel
Kernel may refer to:
Computing
* Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems
* Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution
* Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming
* Kernel method, in machine learn ...
control data that are function pointers. It provides large scale hook protection with small performance overhead
History
Prior rootkit thwarting systems include: Panorama, Hookfinder and systems focused on analyzing rootkit behavior, Copilot, VMwatcher and systems that detect rootkits based on symptoms, Patagonix, NICKLE and systems aimed to preserve kernel
code integrity by preventing malicious rootkit code from executing.
See also
*
Rootkit
A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) and often masks its existence or the exis ...
References
External links
VMwatcher
Utility software types
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