POSTER: Undetectable task bypassing os scheduler via hardware task switching

Abstract

Recently, malicious mining using CPUs has become a trend - mining which the task is not detected by the users is even more of a threat. In this paper, we focused on discovering a new IA-32 1 vulnerability and found an undetectable task using hardware task switching method. The created task is undetectable by the operating system and thus hidden from the system user. Although hardware task switching methods are replaced by more convenient software switching methods in the recent years, they still exist on modern computer systems. By manually manipulating hardware task switching, which is directly managed by the CPU, we show that it is possible to create a hidden scheduler aside from the ones created by the operating system. We demonstrate using a simple CPU consumption example that these hidden tasks have potential to evolve into more sophisticated malicious attacks that can go unnoticed by users. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.