Security Improvement of File System Filter Driver in Windows Embedded OS

IT security companies have been releasing file system filter driver security solutions based on the whitelist, which are being used by several enterprises in the relevant industries. However, in February 2019, a whitelist vulnerability was discovered in Microsoft Edge browser, which allows malicious code to be executed unknown to users. If a hacker had inserted a program that executed malicious code into the whitelist, it would have resulted in considerable damage. File system filter driver security solutions based on the whitelist are discretionary access control (DAC) models. Hence, the whitelist is vulnerable because it only considers the target subject to be accessed, without taking into account the access rights of the file target object. In this study, we propose an industrial device security system for Windows to address this vulnerability, which improves the security of the security policy by determining not only the access rights of the subject but also those of the object through the application of the mandatory access control (MAC) policy in the Windows industrial operating system. The access control method does not base the security policy on the whitelist; instead, by investigating the setting of the security policy not only for the subject but also the object, we propose a method that provides improved stability, compared to the conventional whitelist method.