SwitchMan: An easy-to-use approach to secure user input and output
Conference Paper
Modern operating systems for personal computers (including Linux, MAC, and Windows) provide user-level APIs for an application to access the I/O paths of another application. This design facilitates information sharing between applications, enabling applications such as screenshots. However, it also enables user-level malware to log a user's keystrokes or scrape a user's screen output. In this work, we explore a design called SwitchMan to protect a user's I/O paths against user-level malware attacks. SwitchMan assigns each user with two accounts: a regular one for normal operations and a protected one for inputting and outputting sensitive data. Each user account runs under a separate virtual terminal. Malware running under a user's regular account cannot access sensitive input/output under a user's protected account. At the heart of SwitchMan lies a secure protocol that enables automatic account switching when an application requires sensitive input/output from a user. Our performance evaluation shows that SwitchMan adds acceptable performance overhead. Our security and usability analysis suggests that SwitchMan achieves a better tradeoff between security and usability than existing solutions.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Zheng, S; Zhou, Z; Tang, H; Yang, X
Published Date
- May 1, 2019
Published In
- Proceedings 2019 Ieee Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, Spw 2019
Start / End Page
- 105 - 113
International Standard Book Number 13 (ISBN-13)
- 9781728135083
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1109/SPW.2019.00029
Citation Source
- Scopus