Integrity Checking in Remote Computation
Paolo Falcarin, Riccardo Scandariato, Mario Baldi, Y. Ofek · ARCA (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia) · 2005
How can a client-side application be entrusted albeit running inside an un-trusted environment? Within an un-trusted environment a possibly malicious user has complete access to system resources and tools in order to tamper with the application code. Under those assumptions, the server-side application needs a way to continuously ascertain that the client code has not been altered prior to and during execution, i.e., the server is required to continuously entrust the client. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach based on the client-side generation of an execution signature, which is remotely checked by the server, wherein affirmative checking ensure the authenticity of the client-side software. The method proposed is applicable to remote computation, in general, and has the potential to solve some of the central trust problems in GRID computing.