Security Threats 3 Levels Beyond Kernel Rootkits

GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What's surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: 'Many people tried to prove that BluePill is "detectable" by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are "under" BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.'" Rutkowska says that for her own security, "I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization." She runs three separate virtual machines, designated Red, Yellow, and Green, each running a separate browser and used for increasingly sensitive tasks.

Comments

Re:o.k.

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:I have to agree it is idiotic

[drinkypoo]

AVG is the new Avast! is the new AVP. Each of these has become stupid pathetic bloatware you would never want on your system.

The new GUI freebie is Avira. It pops up an annoying screen every day to try to get you to buy it, guaranteeing that I never, ever, will. But it's found viruses in my stash of no-CD checks* and whatnot that no other scanner I've run has managed to find.

* I recently bought Simcity 4 and Black & White 2 so that I could play them on my laptop, and the vibrating optical drive is not a feature in my book, so I needed some patches. CD checks are fucking evil.