Patent ID: 8341627

Claim:
A method, comprising: identifying an address space in a memory element of a system configured to operate in a virtual environment, wherein the address space includes at least one critical address in user space memory to be protected from unauthorized access, and wherein the critical address is provided to a virtual machine monitor via a hypercall from a privileged domain that manages the virtual machine monitor, and wherein the virtual machine monitor is configured to intercept a single step execution by a processor; generating a page table entry for the critical address in a shadow page table stored in the virtual machine monitor in response to a guest operating system initiating a process, wherein the page table entry is marked as a page not being present in order to trigger a page fault upon an attempt by the process to access the critical address from the guest operating system; intercepting the page fault; and evaluating the page fault to determine if the attempt to access the critical address is from a writable area of the memory element, wherein if the attempt to access is from a writable area of the memory element, the access is denied, such that an application executing the process can be prevented from executing.