Software Protection to Deter Malicious Forensic Data Collection and Exploitation

Global networks bring both new power and new risks. Mission-critical applications are increasingly spread over national or global networks to enable information gathering and sharing on an unprecedented scale. While this large-scale information sharing promises new efficiencies, each endpoint in a network represents a new point of attack. Sensitive applications running on a network must cope with the possibility that some endpoints have been compromised and are gathering forensic data for malicious ends. We propose a combination of technologies and techniques for protecting sensitive software from malicious forensic data collection. Our approach incorporates the following ideas: Offloading portions of the code to reconfigurable hardware; disguising sensitive applications as benign; using covert channels to communicate with relocated code; and providing artifacts that demonstrate the correctness of the protection.