Malware - Anti-malware Strategies - Eliminating Over-privileged Code

Eliminating Over-privileged Code

Over-privileged code dates from the time when most programs were either delivered with a computer or written in-house, and repairing it would at a stroke render most antivirus software almost redundant. It would, however, have appreciable consequences for the user interface and system management.

The system would have to maintain privilege profiles, and know which to apply for each user and program. In the case of newly installed software, an administrator would need to set up default profiles for the new code.

Eliminating vulnerability to rogue device drivers is probably harder than for arbitrary rogue executable. Two techniques, used in VMS, that can help are memory mapping only the registers of the device in question and a system interface associating the driver with interrupts from the device.

Other approaches are:

• Various forms of virtualization, allowing the code unlimited access only to virtual resources
• Various forms of sandbox or jail
• The security functions of Java, in java.security

Such approaches, however, if not fully integrated with the operating system, would reduplicate effort and not be universally applied, both of which would be detrimental to security.