Towards constant bandwidth overhead integrity checking of untrusted data

We present a trace-hash scheme and an adaptive tree-trace scheme to improve the performance of checking the integrity of arbitrarily-large untrusted data, when using only a small fixed-sized trusted state. Currently, hash trees are used to check the data. In many systems that use hash trees, programs perform many data operations before performing a critical operation that exports a result outside of the program's execution environment. The trace-hash and adaptive tree-trace schemes check sequences of data operations. For each of the schemes, for all programs, as the average number of times the program accesses data between critical operations increases, the scheme's bandwidth overhead approaches a constant bandwidth overhead. The trace-hash scheme, intuitively, maintains a "write trace" and a "read trace" of the write and read operations on the untrusted data. At runtime, the traces are updated with a minimal constant-sized bandwidth overhead so that the integrity of a sequence of data operations can be verified at a later time. To maintain the traces in a small fixed-sized trusted space, we introduce a new cryptographic tool, incremental multiset hash functions, to update the traces. To check a sequence of operations, a separate integrity-check operation is performed using the traces.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Clarke, Dwaine E. (Dwaine Errol), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Srinivas Devadas.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33936

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33936