CSC801: Seminar in Computer Science (Spring 2009)

Date: Wednesday February 4, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: 3211, EB 2; NCSU Centennial Campus

Speaker: Ashish Thakwani, NCSU

Isolar: Application Sandboxing using Virtualization

Abstract: Sandboxing is a widely used mechanism for securing applications. Current sandboxing technologies are limited in that they provide application sandboxing by creating virtual user environment or jail, thus relying on trusting the kernel, which, if compromised, compromises all running applications. Kernel-level rootkits allow attackers to take control of a kernel and spread malware across the isolated virtual user environments making existing technologies inadequate. Virtualization technology allows isolation at kernel. Current virtualization technology is suitable for running multiple isolated OS instances, which can in a way be used for application isolation to achieve security, but such a technique has too much resource overhead, also it provides isolation rather than sandbox. We propose Isolar which transparently sandbox an application using lightweight virtualization, in a subordinate, encapsulated kernel. In this talk we'll go through existing solutions, their limitation, and demonstrate how Isolar is different.

Short Bio: Ashish is a master student in the Computer Science department, NC State University. His research interest is on virtualization security. He is currently working on application sandboxing with virtualization under the guidance of Dr. Vincent Freeh.