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Virtualization Based Password Protection against Malware in Untrusted Operating Systems

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Trust and Trustworthy Computing (Trust 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7344))

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Abstract

Password based authentication remains as the mainstream user authentication method for most web servers, despite its known vulnerability to keylogger attacks. Most existing countermeasures are costly because they require a strong isolation of the browser and the operating system. In this paper, we propose KGuard, a password input protection system. Its security is based on the hardware-based virtualization without safeguarding the browser or OS. A security-conscious user can conveniently and securely activate or deactivate the password protection by using key combinations. We have implemented KGuard and experimented our prototype on Windows with Firefox. The results show that no significant performance loss is induced by our protection mechanism when a user authenticates to commercial web servers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

    Yueqiang Cheng & Xuhua Ding

Authors
  1. Yueqiang Cheng
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  2. Xuhua Ding
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technical University Darmstadt, Hochschulstrasse 10, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Katzenbeisser  & Melanie Volkamer  & 

  2. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology and SBA Research, Favoritenstrsse 9-11, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Edgar Weippl

  3. School of Informatics, Indiana University, 901 East Tenth Street, 47405, Bloomington, IN, USA

    L. Jean Camp

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 201 S. Columbia Street UNH-CH, 27599-3175, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Mike Reiter

  5. Huawei America R&D, 2330 Central Expressway, 95050, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Xinwen Zhang

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cheng, Y., Ding, X. (2012). Virtualization Based Password Protection against Malware in Untrusted Operating Systems. In: Katzenbeisser, S., Weippl, E., Camp, L.J., Volkamer, M., Reiter, M., Zhang, X. (eds) Trust and Trustworthy Computing. Trust 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7344. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30921-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30921-2_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-30920-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-30921-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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