Abstracts

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

  Application Memory Authentication

  D. Champagne, R. Elbaz, R. B. Lee
 
Application Memory Authentication (AMA) consists in verifying that what an application reads from memory at a given address is what it last wrote there. Modern operating systems typically cannot be trusted to enforce such application memory space integrity, as exploitable software vulnerabilities are commonly found in these large, complex and extendable software systems. In this talk, we describe the problem of AMA and show, through an attack we call branch splicing, that most common memory integrity tree solutions cannot provide AMA. Finally, we describe and analyze major problems that prevent, in practice, the deployment of the AMA mechanisms proposed in the literature.