An OS Security Protection Model for Defeating Attacks from Network

Security threats to operating systems today largely come from network. Traditional discretionary access control mechanism alone can hardly defeat them. Although traditional mandatory access control models can effectively protect the security of OS, they have problems of application incompatibility and administration complexity. In this paper, we propose a new model, Suspicious-Taint-Based Access Control (STBAC) model, for defeating network attacks while maintaining good compatibility, simplicity and system performance. STBAC regards processes using Non-Trustable-Communications as starting points of suspicious taint, traces activities of the suspiciously tainted processes by taint rules, and forbids the suspiciously tainted processes to illegally access vital resources by protection rules. Even in the cases when some privileged processes are subverted, STBAC can still protect vital resources from being compromised by the intruder. We implemented the model in the Linux kernel and evaluated it through experiments. The evaluation showed that STBAC could protect vital resources effectively without significant impact on compatibility and performance.