A portable user-level approach for system-wide integrity protection

In this paper, we develop an approach for protecting system integrity from untrusted code that may harbor sophisticated malware. We develop a novel dual-sandboxing architecture to confine not only untrusted, but also benign processes. Our sandboxes place only a few restrictions, thereby permitting most applications to function normally. Our implementation is performed entirely at the user-level, requiring no changes to the kernel. This enabled us to port the system easily from Linux to BSD. Our experimental results show that our approach preserves the usability of applications, while offering strong protection and good performance. Moreover, policy development is almost entirely automated, sparing users and administrators this cumbersome and difficult task.