Isolation Techniques for Untrusted Software

Open source software is built through collaboration and sharing by a large community of programmers and has wide acceptance in industry and government. Open source software provides considerable benefits of cost and technical innovation which can be prohibitive to duplicate. Unfortunately, open source software used in an embedded system could contain hidden malware which could be activated by triggers to the detriment of a warfighter. PRO-telligent proposes isolating untrusted software in guarded virtual machines. The virtual machine guard will be based on recent extrusion detection research which asserts that process activity occurring independent of human activity on the computer/system is suspect. The guard would be designed using virtual machine introspection to make the guard secure and fast. We believe this approach will protect the warfighter against the potential of embedded malware.