Computation Integrity Measurement Based on Branch Transfer

Tasks are selectively migrated to the cloud with the widespread adoption of the cloud computing platform, but the user cannot know whether the tasks are tampered in the cloud, so it is an urgent demand for cloud users to verify the execution integrity of the program in the cloud. The computation integrity measurement based on behavior is difficult to detect carefully crafted shell code. According to the property of shell code, this paper proposes a computation integrity measurement based on branch transfer called CIMB, which is a fine-grained instruction-level integrity measurement. In this approach, all branches in the user-level have been recorded, which effectively cover all execution control flow of a program, and CIMB can detect control-flow hijacking attacks without the support of source code, such as Return-oriented Programming (ROP) and Jump-oriented Programming (JOP). Meanwhile, distance between two instruction addresses and machine code of instruction can mask the measurement inconsistency derived from address space layout randomization of program and shared libraries. Finally, we have implemented CIMB with a dynamic binary instrumentation tool Pin on x86 32-bit version of ubuntu12.04. Its experimental results show that CIMB is feasible and it has a relatively stable measurement result, and the advantages of CIMB and factors affecting the results of measurement are analyzed and discussed.