Computer system protection by communication diversity

G - Physics – 06 – F

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G06F 12/14 (2006.01) G06F 1/00 (2006.01) G06F 9/45 (2006.01)

Patent

CA 2363795

Attacks by viruses, worm programs, and other hostile software ('malware'), have become very serious problems for computer systems con- nected to the Internet. Such 'canned' (automated) attacks are arguably the big threat to the pro- ductive use of computer systems in the modern world. Human hackers can- not be massively replicated and distributed: viruses, worm programs, attack scripts, and denial-of-service attacks can be. An embodiment of the inven- tion disclosed herein can provide protection against 'canned' attacks. Defenses against such hostile intruder software have been mounted in many ways (friend/foe identification, sand-boxes, firewalls, behavior profiles, rule- based access controls, etc.). Despite such defensive measures, good defenses remain labor-intensive, and outside the easy reach of home computers and other low-cost system installations. There are proposals for new diversity-based approaches[5, 10] which, rather then trying to keep up with changes in malware, diversify the attacked systems to make the creation of effective malware more difficult, whether by varying systems over time[5] or varying instances over systems in space[10]. Whether the diversity is temporal or spatial, the kinds of diversity which have been proposed are less than substantial. (Such superficial changes are ef- fective against some malware, but more substantial changes would be effective against a broader spectrum of malware.) The current invention is diversity-based, but greatly expands previous pro- posals by organizing the method around a new central idea. Herein, we de- scribe a modified approach to the generation of tamper-resistant software (TRS)[1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 19, 20], which we call a Babel defense, as a protection against malware attacks. This approach is based on the observation that ren- dering fraudulent communications effectively meaningless prevents the effects which the fraud was intended to achieve. In a Babel defense, we modify the communications among components of the system, with corresponding changes to the code handling those communications.

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