A Hypervisor for Injecting Scenario-Based Attack Effects

An essential phase in the testing of a security system is to attack the target software in a test environment and then to check the response of the security system. However, obtaining or developing a sufficient number of vulnerable software and exploits is not straightforward. One approach for collecting information on how a security system reacts to various attacks is to ``fabricate´´ the effects of attacks in the target software by using a fault-injection tool. In this paper, we propose Hyper Attacker, which is a software-implemented fault injection system for testing security systems. Hyper Attacker injects faults or attack effects according to the scenarios provided by the user. When an event specified by a given scenario occurs in the monitored software, Hyper Attacker injects the attack effect associated with the event. Supported effects include the updating of values in registers, user memory areas, and kernel memory areas. Hyper Attacker is implemented by modifying the Xen hyper visor, and attack effects are injected from one special virtual machine to the target software running on another virtual machine. Experimental results showed that Hyper Attacker is effective in causing various security systems to take responsive actions.