Secure browser architecture based on hardware virtualization

Ensuring the entire code base of a browser to deal with the security concerns of integrity and confidentiality is a daunting task. The basic method is to split it into different components and place each of them in its own protection domain. OS processes are the prevalent isolation mechanism to implement the protection domain, which result in expensive context-switching overheads produced by Inter-Process Communication (TPC). Besides, the dependences of multiple web instance processes on a single set of privileged ones reduce the entire concurrency. In this paper, we present a secure browser architecture design based on processor virtualization technique. First, we divide the browser code base into privileged components and constrained components which consist of distrusted web page Tenderer components and plugins. All constrained components are in the form of shared object (SO) libraries. Second, we create an isolated execution environment for each distrusted shared object library using the hardware virtualization support available in modern Intel and AMD processors. Different from the current researches, we design a custom kernel module to gain the hardware virtualization capabilities. Third, to enhance the entire security of browser, we implement a validation mechanism to check the OS resources access from distrusted web page Tenderer to the privileged components. Our validation rules is similar with Google chrome. By utilizing VMENTER and VMEXIT which are both CPU instructions, our approach can gain a better system performance substantially.