Protection of software-based survivability mechanisms

Abstract

Many existing survivability mechanisms rely on software-based system monitoring and control. Some of the software resides on application hosts that are not necessarily trustworthy. The integrity of these software components is therefore essential to the reliability and trustworthiness of the survivability scheme. We address the problem of protecting trusted software on untrustworthy hosts by software transformations. Our techniques include a systematic introduction of aliases in combination with a "break-down" of the program control-flow; transforming high-level control transfers to indirect addressing through aliased pointers. In so doing, we transform programs to a form that yields data flow information very slowly and/or with little precision. We present a theoretical result which shows that a precise analysis of the transformed program, in the general case, is NP-hard and demonstrate the applicability of our techniques with empirical results.