Hypervisor Advanced Robust Protection (HARP)

There has been a significant push in recent years to move more and more critical infrastructure onto the Internet. Unfortunately, this network-centric model creates real security risks. A successful compromise of these network systems can lead to disclosure of sensitive information or even direct manipulation of critical resources. The threat of attack is ever increasing due to the ongoing arms race between malware authors and protection technology vendors. Both sides are constantly innovating in order to defeat the other side's new technologies in a self-perpetuating manner. This document proposes a solution that will prevent sensitive program code from being reverse engineered or tampered with using the tools available to an attacker today through the development of a hypervisor (a hardware-assisted virtual machine technology being introduced into the latest x86 processors). The developed hypervisor will allow, from the point of view of the operating system and a protected application, encrypted code to be executed directly by the processor. Decrypted code will not be available outside the hypervisor, and since the reverse engineering tools available today do not support hypervisors, this protection technology will significantly increase the difficulty of any attack on protected code.