On virtualisation

Posted by Tavis Ormandy, Security Team

Following Panayiotis' and Niels' post on malware, I'd like to discuss a somewhat related topic, virtualisation. Virtual machines are often used by security researchers to sandbox malware samples for analysis, or to protect a machine from a potentially hazardous activity. The theory is that any security threat or malicious behaviour will be restricted to the virtual environment which can be discarded and then restored to pristine condition after use.

Virtual machines are sometimes thought of as impenetrable barriers between the guest and host, but in reality they're (usually) just another layer of software between you and the attacker. As with any complex application, it would be naive to think such a large codebase could be written without some serious bugs creeping in. If any of those bugs are exploitable, attackers restricted to the guest could potentially break out onto the host machine. I investigated this topic earlier this year, and presented a paper at CanSecWest on a number of ways that an attacker could break out of a virtual machine.

Most of the attacks identified were flaws, such as buffer overflows, in emulated hardware devices. One example of this is missing bounds checking in bitblt routines, which are used for moving rectangular blocks of data around the display. If exploited, by specifying pathological parameters for the operation, this could lead to an attacker compromising the virtual machine process. While you would typically require root (or equivalent) privileges in the guest to interact with a device at the low level required, device drivers will often offload the parameter checking required onto the hardware, so in theory an unprivileged attacker could be able to access flaws like this by simply interacting with the regular API or system call interface provided by the guest operating system.

While researching this topic we worked with the vendors affected to make sure they were aware of our findings, and provided patches where possible. I've also suggested some precautions virtualization you can take to minimise the impact of any flaws like this discovered in future, such as:

Reduce the attack surface

By disabling emulated devices, features and services you don't need you reduce the amount of code exposed to an attacker, thus reducing the number of possible bugs that can be exploited. You should also aim to protect the integrity of the guest operating system, making it harder for an attacker to get lower level access to emulated hardware. By keeping software in the guest up to date, and hardening it by locking down the operating system and minimising what is run with root or admin privileges, you can reduce the risk of privilege escalation attacks. If an attacker cannot get low level access to the emulated hardware, it will be more difficult to exploit the bugs in them. Remember that some legacy operating systems make no attempt to restrict access to I/O ports and similar interfaces, these should be used with caution in a security sensitive context.

Treat virtual machines as services that can be compromised

Most administrators will take steps to limit the impact of a compromise of a network facing daemon, such as using chroot() or running the daemon as a low privileged user. These same tactics can be applied to your virtual machine. As always, try to minimise what has to run as root or administrator.

Keep software up to date

Keep your virtual machine software up to date, and look out for any security advisories from your vendor so that you can apply any patches promptly.

Introducing Google's online security efforts

Posted by Panayiotis Mavrommatis and Niels Provos, Anti-Malware Team

Online security is an important topic for Google, our users, and anyone who uses the Internet. The related issues are complex and dynamic and we've been looking for a way to foster discussion on the topic and keep users informed. Thus, we've started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we'll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post.

Malware -- surreptitious software capable of stealing sensitive information from your computer -- is increasingly spreading over the web. Visiting a compromised web server with a vulnerable browser or plugins can result in your system being infected with a whole variety of malware without any interaction on your part. Software installations that leverage exploits are termed "drive-by downloads". To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised.

To get a better understanding about the geographic distribution of sites engaging in drive-by downloads, we analyzed the location of compromised web sites and the location of malware distribution hosts. At the moment, the majority of malware activity seems to happen in China, the U.S., Germany and Russia (see below):

Location of compromised web sites. These are often sites that are benign in nature but have been compromised and have become dangerous for users to visit.

Location of malware distribution servers. These are servers that are used by malware authors to distribute their payload. Very often the compromised sites are modified to include content from these servers. The color coding works as follows: Green means that we did not find anything unsual in that country, yellow means low activity, orange medium activity and red high activity.

Guidelines on safe browsing
First and foremost, enable automatic updates for your operating system as well your browsers, browser plugins and other applications you are using. Automatic updates ensure that your computer receives the latest security patches as they are published. We also recommend that you run an anti-virus engine that checks network traffic and files on your computer for known malware and abnormal behavior. If you want to be really sure that your system does not become permanently compromised, you might even want to run your browser in a virtual machine, which you can revert to a clean snapshot after every browsing session.

Webmasters can learn more about cleaning, and most importantly, keeping their sites secure at StopBadware.org's Tips for Cleaning and Securing a Website.