RegVault: hardware assisted selective data randomization for operating system kernels

Jinyan Xu, Haoran Lin, Ziqi Yuan, Wenbo Shen, Yajin Zhou, Rui Chang, Lei Wu, Kui Ren

Abstract: This paper presents RegVault, a hardware-assisted lightweight data randomization scheme for OS kernels. RegVault introduces novel cryptographically strong hardware primitives to protect both the confidentiality and integrity of register-grained data. RegVault leverages annotations to mark sensitive data and instruments their loads and stores automatically. Moreover, RegVault also introduces new techniques to protect the interrupt context and safeguard the sensitive data spilling. We implement a prototype of RegVault by extending RISC-V architecture to protect six types of sensitive data in Linux kernel. Our evaluations show that RegVault can defend against the kernel data attacks effectively with a minimal performance overhead.