Improving coherency of runtime integrity measurement

  • Authors:

  • Mark Thober;J. Aaron Pendergrass;C. Durward McDonell

  • Affiliations:

  • The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA;The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA;The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Scalable trusted computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Recent work in software integrity verification provides techniques for measuring integrity at runtime, where a measurement agent observes the memory image of a running process and constructs some meaningful description of the process's current state. Unlike in static and load time measurement architectures, the target of a runtime measurement is running and hence able to change its state. In this setting, an accurate measurement must reflect a coherent state of the target. A coherent measurement must satisfy two properties: atomicity ensures that a measurement corresponds to the state of the target at a particular point in time and quiescence ensures that the target data is in a consistent state, i.e. not a critical section. We address the former property, showing that we can obtain an atomic measurement using a memory copy-on-write strategy, which we have implemented in the Xen hypervisor. We show that this approach achieves significant performance gains in the memory and time impact to the target, when compared with naive strategies for enforcing atomicity.