protecting portable storage with host validation
Portable storage devices, such as key-chain USB devices, are ubiquitous and used everywhere; users repeatedly use the same storage device in open computer laboratories, Internet cafes, and on office and home computers. Consequently, they are the target of malware that exploit the data present or use them as a means to propagate malicious software., e.g., Conficker and Agent.bz. We present the Kells mobile storage system, which limits untrusted or unknown systems from accessing sensitive data by continuously validating the accessing host's integrity state. We explore the design and operation of Kells, and implement a proof-of-concept USB 2.0 storage device of experimental hardware. Our experiments indicate nominal overheads associated with host validation, with a worst-case throughput overhead of 1.22\% for reads and 2.78\% for writes.
storage validation security