• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.5588-5613
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• 2018

Virtualization technology has been widely applied in the area of computer security research that provides a new method for system protection. It has been a hotspot in system security research at present. Virtualization technology brings new risk as well as progress to computer operating system (OS). A multi-level perception security model using virtualization is proposed to deal with the problems of over-simplification of risk models, unreliable assumption of secure virtual machine monitor (VMM) and insufficient integration with virtualization technology in security design. Adopting the enhanced isolation mechanism of address space, the security perception units can be protected from risk environment. Based on parallel perceiving by the secure domain possessing with the same privilege level as VMM, a mechanism is established to ensure the security of VMM. In addition, a special pathway is set up to strengthen the ability of information interaction in the light of making reverse use of the method of covert channel. The evaluation results show that the proposed model is able to obtain the valuable risk information of system while ensuring the integrity of security perception units, and it can effectively identify the abnormal state of target system without significantly increasing the extra overhead.