Sensitive information management system for un-trusted system platforms

The threats of backdoors and vulnerabilities in general-purpose operating systems complicate protection of sensitive information. This paper describes a sensitive memory management system (SMM) which protects sensitive information memory and prevents attackers from obtaining sensitive information by compromising the operating system kernel. Virtualization is used to set up different shadow page tables for the user-mode and the kernel-mode of the protected process and then controls access to the sensitive information so that only the proper applications can access the information and not the operating systems kernel. Tests show that the memory is protected with finer granularity and lower overhead than previous methods.