Scientists Unveil Lightweight Rootkit Protection

DangerFace writes "Scientists are set to unveil a lightweight system they say makes an operating system significantly more resistant to rootkits without degrading its performance. The hypervisor-based system is dubbed HookSafe, and it works by relocating kernel hooks in a guest OS to a dedicated page-aligned memory space that's tightly locked down. The team installed HookSafe on a machine running Ubuntu 8.04, and found the system successfully prevented nine real-world rootkits targeting that platform from installing or hiding themselves. The program was able to achieve that protection with only a 6 percent reduction in performance benchmarks."

Comments

Hmm , is there a reason they didn't use Windows?

[Viol8]

... it being partly a microsoft research project and all. They wouldn't be trying to imply anything about Linux would they , or perish the thought , be unwilling to embarras themselves if Windows could *still* be rooted even after this solution was installed?

By any other name

[fibonacci8]

A root kit is just a sandbox that someone else has set up for you on what is now his or her computer.