Hypervisor Advanced Robust Protection (HARP)

Software continues to grow more complex over time, and our reliance on software continues to grow. As such, security engineers are under more pressure to protect the secrets held in software than ever. Attackers, however, have an advantage over security researchers due to the inherent characteristic of software that a protected application must execute in plain text in order for the processor to operate correctly. Therefore, sophisticated attack tools are able to defeat nearly any software-based protection mechanism. What is needed is a software protection framework that is immune to this inherent weakness. By using a hypervisor, sensitive data and algorithms are moved outside of the reach of the operating system, and therefore outside the reach of virtually all software-based attack tools. This document proposes continued development of the proof-of-concept software protection framework presented in Phase I based on our custom hypervisor implementation. The document describes the effort required to build a robust and extendable framework based on this research.