Abstract
With the growing number of successful computer attacks, especially those using the Internet and exploiting software vulnerabilities, software protection has become an important issue in computer security. This paper proposes a system – SPEE – for software integrity protection and authentication and presents performance results. Our system architecture utilizes key components from the compilation process as well as operating system support to provide static verification of executables. Code integrity checking is performed by means of a hierarchical hashing scheme, which not only detects changes but also efficiently isolates them. This scheme provides a higher level of protection against code injection or modification than a simple chaining of the program blocks. As an additional benefit, it also provides forensic information in case of a verification failure by providing the user with information about which part of the program has been modified. The SPEE tool is designed to function as part of the operating system kernel in order to provide a trusted computing system.