Fides: selectively hardening software application components against kernel-level or process-level malware

Protecting commodity operating systems against software exploits is known to be challenging, because of their sheer size. The same goes for key software applications such as web browsers or mail clients. As a consequence, a significant fraction of internet-connected computers is infected with malware. To mitigate this threat, we propose a combined approach of (1) a run-time security architecture that can efficiently protect fine-grained software modules executing on a standard operating system, and (2) a compiler that compiles standard C source code modules to such protected binary modules. The offered security guarantees are significant: relying on a TCB of only a few thousand lines of code, we show that the power of arbitrary kernel-level or process-level malware is reduced to interacting with the module through the module's public API. With a proper API design and implementation, modules are fully protected. The run-time architecture can be loaded on demand and only incurs performance overhead when it is loaded. Benchmarks show that, once loaded, it incurs a 3.22% system-wide performance cost. For applications that make intensive use of protected modules, and hence benefit most of the security guarantees provided, the performance cost is up to 14%.