Virtualization-assisted Framework for Prevention of Software Vulnerability Based Security Attacks

Virtualization is a useful technology for addressing security concerns since it allows for the creation of isolated software execution environments, e.g., for separation of the sensitive parts of a system from the complex, untrusted parts. This paper describes a tool for dynamically detecting and preventing software vulnerabilities that exploits the availability of virtualized (isolated) execution environments. A program that is not itself malicious, but could have vulnerabilities, is first safely executed within a virtualized Testing environment, wherein its execution is traced using dynamic binary instrumentation and checked against extensive security policies that express the behavioral patterns associated with various vulnerability exploits.