Establishing software integrity trust: A survey and lightweight authentication system for windows

Abstract

Malware causes damage by stealing confidential data or making other software unusable. Ensuring software trustworthiness is difficult because malware may disguise itself to appear benign or trusted. This chapter explores the problem of making software more trustworthy through the use of binary integrity mechanisms. The authors review the problem of devising an effective binary integrity protection, and discuss how it complements other operating system security measures. They analyze design factors for binary integrity and compare existing systems. The authors then present a prototype which exemplifies a mandatory binary integrity mechanism and its integration within an operating system. Their system, BinAuth, demonstrates a practical, lightweight in-kernel binary authentication system for Microsoft Windows. A system like BinAuth shows that mandatory authentication is practical on complex commodity operating system like Windows. To deal with various constraints in the user's environments, BinAuth uses a flexible scheme which does not mandate public key infrastructure (PKI) although it can take advantage of it. The authors also combine the authentication with a simple software-ID scheme which is useful for software management and vulnerability assessment. © 2010, IGI Global.