Driver-originated vulnerabilities are well-known threats to modern monolithic kernels. However, existing driver isolation solutions either rely on Intel-only or newly-introduced CPU features (e.g., Intel VMFUNC, ARM MTE), or suffer from performance issues, making them unsuitable for existing ARM-based devices. In this work, we leverage a common hardware feature, named hardware watchpoint, to achieve lightweight driver isolation for off-the-shelf ARM devices. Specifically, we utilize watchpoints to prevent the possibly compromised driver from corrupting the rest kernel’s state arbitrarily. We implement a prototype for ARM64 Linux. The security analysis and performance evaluation show the efficiency and practicality of our solution.

Android application (or app) developers increasingly integrate third-party libraries to enrich the functionality of their apps. However, current permission model on Android cannot constrain the behaviors of in-app third-party libraries for allowing them to operate with the same permissions as their host app. This brings serious security and privacy concerns to users. In this article, we proposeLibCapsule, a user-level solution to confine third-party libraries from potential permission abuses. Compared to previous systems,LibCapsuleis able to providecompleteconfinement of third-party libraries in Android apps, including the static Java code, dynamically loaded code and native code of third-party libraries. We have developed a prototype ofLibCapsule, and collected 204 popular third-party libraries as well as 2,021 apps to evaluate it. The evaluation results indicate thatLibCapsuleis capable of enforcing complete and fine-grained regulation on third-party libraries according to customized security policies with a low performance overhead. To engage the whole community, we will release the dataset of third-party libraries and apps in our evaluation.