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Hackers Beware: New Protection for Computers

By: Susan Grant, High School Liaison Officer, ECE

We’ve all been there. You’re working on your computer when suddenly the “blue screen of death” appears, or letters fall like leaves from an autumn tree. Some stealth programs work more subtly, stealing information about you. No one has time for this!

Enter Professor David Lie and his research group in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He thinks we’ve suffered long enough and has come up with a novel way of protecting our computers.

“Machines these days can become infected by stealthy malware, which covertly executes on your machine, secretly gathering information about you or using your computer to launch attacks on other computers,” said Professor Lie.

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ECE Professor, David Lie

Professor Lie has a technology that can securely identify all the code on your machine even if it has been infected by such malware – think of it as an X-ray for your computer system. In this way, no malware can hide on your system.

The technology uses a Hypervisor, which is a thin layer of software that runs below the operating system. This means it is able to detect malware that can take over the operating system. It is compatible with many current hypervisors such as VMware, Xen and HyperV. Professor Lie’s group has implemented experimental prototypes on VMware and Xen.

To detect code as it is executing, they utilize NX-bit technology, which tells the processor hardware to inform the system whenever new code is executed. At that time, the system then inspects the code and identifies it as either benign code that should be permitted to execute, or unknown, malicious code that somehow found its way onto the system.

To learn more about Professor Lie’s research, go to: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~lie/papers/Patagonix-Web-2008.pdf

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