System Self-Protection and Autonomic Response for Hardware Based Software Protection

In this project, we propose a solution to protect the communication between COTS processors and hardware protection devices (HPDs) in hardware-assisted software protection schemes. In addition, we develop mechanisms to detect tampering, provide appropriate responses and in some cases heal the application in that context. First, we propose to decouple the transmission of encrypted software snippets from (the timing of) their use in the application. The anti-tamper solution is based on embedding special-purpose Guard Snippets into the application. The Guard Snippets are tied together with the other snippets in a dependence graph and would monitor tampering such as replay attacks, removal of snippets, and integrity violation. Finally, we present a solution to heal attacks that would involve removing the snippet-based protection mechanisms. We propose the heal an application by accessing its virtual memory. The snippets themselves would carry the information that is needed to rebuild the application’s protection.