Research Of Web Browser Security System Based On Hypervisor Architecture

Web browsers have become the main entrance to a broad range of applications,including web-based email, gaming, online banking, and e-commerce services, etc.Unfortunately, there are two major problems while using web browsers. Firstly, it isimpossible to eliminate all key loggers which reside in computers. Key loggers are aserious threat to the security of user’s online accounts and passwords. Secondly,browser-based surreptitious malware infections have become the primary method todeliver malicious software onto the computers across the Internet. Web browser securityefforts that retrofit existing browsers architecture have some limitations because of theirbad compatibility.The compatibility problem can be well solved via virtualization technology. Targetingon this problem, we present the design and implementation of the system for enhancingweb browser security via using hardware virtualization, which is named SIND for short.SIND is compatible with existing browser-based applications, and aims to solve the twomajor security threats. The system which we developed has several distinctive features. Atiny hypervisor is proposed to protect the security components against kernel-level attacks,enhance the security of the whole system, and it can be inserted or removed on the fly. Akernel driver called SafeInput has been used to provide passwords protection against keyloggers. Meanwhile we present a browser independent method to detect and preventbrowser-based malware infections.The experimental results indicate that SIND is realistic to achieve significantly strongsecurity with acceptable performance impact, compared with bare operating system. Thebenchmarks show that the overhead of process creation and termination is about8.9%, thehardware virtulization costed only1.23%performance degradation, and the overhead ofwhole system is only0.52%.