Shielding Your Privacy with the Local-Booted Virtual Machine

Encrypted and Deniable File System (EDFS) is widely used to hide the existence of files and directories. However, existing EDFS solutions suffer the challenges which operating systems and many applications will leak the existence information. This paper proposes a novel virtual machine based approach, namely Shadow Execution Environment (SEE), to address this issue. SEE combines EDFS and our Local-Booted Technology, which means that a VM boots not from a newly installed OS image but just from the underlying host OS, to guarantee all the information about privacy data accesses is bounded within SEE itself. With this powerful characteristic, SEE provides an encrypted, deniable and complete execution environment instead of just file system. The functional evaluation illustrates that SEE can defeat three broad classes of information leakage vectors.