TrustLogin: Securing Password-Login on Commodity Operating Systems

With the increasing prevalence of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, password-based logins play an increasingly important role on user-end systems. We use passwords to authenticate ourselves to countless applications and services. However, login credentials can be easily stolen by attackers. In this paper, we present a framework, TrustLogin, to secure password-based logins on commodity operating systems. TrustLogin leverages System Management Mode to protect the login credentials from malware even when OS is compromised. TrustLogin does not modify any system software in either client or server and is transparent to users, applications, and servers. We conduct two study cases of the framework on legacy and secure applications, and the experimental results demonstrate that TrustLogin is able to protect login credentials from real-world keyloggers on Windows and Linux platforms. TrustLogin is robust against spoofing attacks. Moreover, the experimental results also show TrustLogin introduces a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Fengwei Zhang, Kevin Leach, Haining Wang, Angelos Stavrou
• Keywords: CCS 2015, Security Privacy