Kernel Malware Analysis With Un-Tampered and Temporal Views of Dynamic Kernel Memory

Dynamic kernel memory has been a popular target of recent kernel malware due to the difficulty of determining the status of volatile dynamic kernel objects. Some existing approaches use kernel memory mapping to identify dynamic kernel objects and check kernel integrity. The snapshot-based memory maps generated by these approaches are based on the kernel memory which may have been manipulated by kernel malware. In addition, because the snapshot only reflects the memory status at a single time instance, its usage is limited in temporal kernel execution analysis. The authors introduce a new runtime kernel memory mapping scheme called allocation-driven mapping, which systematically identifies dynamic kernel objects, including their types and lifetimes. The scheme works by capturing kernel object allocation and deallocation events.