skip to main content
10.1145/1095810.1095812acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessospConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Pioneer: verifying code integrity and enforcing untampered code execution on legacy systems

Published: 20 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We propose a primitive, called Pioneer, as a first step towards verifiable code execution on untrusted legacy hosts. Pioneer does not require any hardware support such as secure co-processors or CPU-architecture extensions. We implement Pioneer on an Intel Pentium IV Xeon processor. Pioneer can be used as a basic building block to build security systems. We demonstrate this by building a kernel rootkit detector.

References

[1]
Tripwire. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/.
[2]
VMware. http://www.vmware.com/.
[3]
AMD platform for trustworthy computing. In WinHEC, September 2003.
[4]
Secure virtual machine architecture reference manual. AMD Corp., May 2005.
[5]
Network Appliance. Postmark: A new file system benchmark. Available at http://www.netapp.com/techlibrary/3022.html, 2004.
[6]
W. Arbaugh. Personal communication, May 2005.
[7]
D. Boggs, A. Baktha, J. Hawkins, D. Marr, J. Miller, P. Roussel, R. Singhal, B. Toll, and K.S. Venkatraman. The microarchitecture of the Intel Pentium 4 processor on 90nm technology. Intel Technology Journal, 8(01), February 2004.
[8]
B. Chen and R. Morris. Certifying program execution with secure procesors. In Proceedings of HotOS IX, 2003.
[9]
A. Chuvakin. Ups and downs of unix/linux host-based security solutions. ;login: The Magazine of USENIX and SAGE, 28(2), April 2003.
[10]
Free Software Foundation. superopt - finds the shortest instruction sequence for a given function. http://www.gnu.org/directory/devel/compilers/superopt.html.
[11]
T. Garfinkel, B. Pfaff, J. Chow, M. Rosenblum, and D. Boneh. Terra: A virtual machine-based platform for trusted computing. In In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2003.
[12]
Intel Corp. LaGrande Technology Architectural Overview, September 2003.
[13]
Intel Corporation. IA32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual Vol.1.
[14]
K. J. Jones. Loadable Kernel Modules. ;login: The Magazine of USENIX and SAGE, 26(7), November 2001.
[15]
R. Joshi, G. Nelson, and K. Randall. Denali: a goal-directed superoptimizer. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), pages 304--314, 2002.
[16]
R. Kennell and L. Jamieson. Establishing the genuinity of remote computer systems. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, August 2003.
[17]
S. King and P. Chen. Backtracking intrusions. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pages 223--236, 2003.
[18]
A. Klimov and A. Shamir. A new class of invertible mappings. In CHES '02: Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, pages 470--483, 2003.
[19]
N. Petroni, T. Fraser, J. Molina, and W. Arbaugh. Copilot - a coprocessor-based kernel runtime integrity monitor. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pages 179--194, 2004.
[20]
R. Sailer, X. Zhang, T. Jaeger, and L. van Doorn. Design and implementation of a TCG-based integrity measurement architecture. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pages 223--238, 2004.
[21]
A. Seshadri, A. Perrig, L. van Doorn, and P. Khosla. SWATT: Software-based attestation for embedded devices. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2004.
[22]
U. Shankar, M. Chew, and J. D. Tygar. Side effects are not sufficient to authenticate software. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, pages 89--101, August 2004.
[23]
E. Shi, A. Perrig, and L. van Doorn. Bind: A fine-grained attestation service for secure distributed systems. In Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pages 154--168, 2005.
[24]
Trusted Computing Group (TCG). https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/, 2003.
[25]
Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Yin, and Hongbo Yu. Finding collisions in the full sha-1. In Proceedings of Crypto, August 2005.
[26]
Y. Wang, R. Roussev, C. Verbowski, A. Johnson, and D. Ladd. AskStrider: What has changed on my machine lately? Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-03, Microsoft Research, 2004.
[27]
Y. Wang, B. Vo, R. Roussev, C. Verbowski, and A. Johnson. Strider GhostBuster: Why it's a bad idea for stealth software to hide files. Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-71, Microsoft Research, 2004.
[28]
G. Wurster, P. van Oorschot, and A. Somayaji. A generic attack on checksumming-based software tamper resistance. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2005.
[29]
D. Zovi. Kernel rootkits. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ghandi/lkr.pdf.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Blockchain Handshaking with Software Assurance: Version++ Protocol for Bitcoin CryptocurrencyElectronics10.3390/electronics1319385713:19(3857)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Orbital Shield: Rethinking Satellite Security in the Commercial Off-the-Shelf Era2024 Security for Space Systems (3S)10.23919/3S60530.2024.10592292(1-11)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
  • (2024)A Software Integrity Authentication Protocol for Zero Trust ArchitectureProceedings of the SIGCOMM Workshop on Zero Trust Architecture for Next Generation Communications10.1145/3672200.3673874(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SOSP '05: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
October 2005
259 pages
ISBN:1595930795
DOI:10.1145/1095810
  • cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
    ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review  Volume 39, Issue 5
    SOSP '05
    December 2005
    290 pages
    ISSN:0163-5980
    DOI:10.1145/1095809
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 October 2005

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. dynamic root of trust
  2. rootkit detection
  3. self-check-summing code
  4. software-based code attestation
  5. verifiable code execution

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

SOSP05
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 961 submissions, 18%

Upcoming Conference

SOSP '25
ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
October 13 - 16, 2025
Seoul , Republic of Korea

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)45
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Blockchain Handshaking with Software Assurance: Version++ Protocol for Bitcoin CryptocurrencyElectronics10.3390/electronics1319385713:19(3857)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Orbital Shield: Rethinking Satellite Security in the Commercial Off-the-Shelf Era2024 Security for Space Systems (3S)10.23919/3S60530.2024.10592292(1-11)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
  • (2024)A Software Integrity Authentication Protocol for Zero Trust ArchitectureProceedings of the SIGCOMM Workshop on Zero Trust Architecture for Next Generation Communications10.1145/3672200.3673874(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
  • (2024)SAFEHIVE: Secure Attestation Framework for Embedded and Heterogeneous IoT Devices in Variable EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems10.1145/3643650.3658609(41-50)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Efficient Auditing of Event-driven Web ApplicationsProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650089(1208-1224)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
  • (2024)One for All and All for One: GNN-based Control-Flow Attestation for Embedded Devices2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00251(3346-3364)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
  • (2024)Integrity Management in Softwarized NetworksNOMS 2024-2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10574994(1-7)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)MATCH-IN: Mutual Attestation for Trusted Collaboration in Heterogeneous IoT Networks2024 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)10.1109/ISCC61673.2024.10733616(1-6)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Securing the future: exploring post-quantum cryptography for authentication and user privacy in IoT devicesCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-024-04799-428:2Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Distributed and Lightweight Software Assurance in Cellular Broadcasting Handshake and Connection EstablishmentElectronics10.3390/electronics1218378212:18(3782)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2023
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media