An extended proof-carrying code framework for security enforcement

  • Authors:

  • Heidar Pirzadeh;Danny Dubé;Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada;Department of Computer Science, Laval University, Quebec City, QC, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on computational science XI
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in increased attention to security to protect users from being victims of security threats. In this paper, we focus on security mechanisms that are based on Proof-Carrying Code (PCC) techniques. In a PCC system, a code producer sends a code along with its safety proof to the consumer. The consumer executes the code only if the proof is valid. Although PCC has been shown to be a useful security framework, it suffers from the sheer size of typical proofs -proofs of even small programs can be considerably large. In this paper, we propose an extended PCC framework (EPCC) in which, instead of the proof, a proof generator for the program in question is transmitted. This framework enables the execution of the proof generator and the recovery of the proof on the consumer's side in a secure manner using a newly created virtual machine called the VEP (Virtual Machine for Extended PCC).