Access Control for Binary Integrity Protection using Ethereum

Abstract

The integrity of executable binaries is essential to the security of any device that runs them. At best, a manipulated binary can leave the system in question open to attack, and at worst, it can compromise the entire system by itself. In recent years, supply-chain attacks have demonstrated that binaries can even be compromised unbeknownst to their creators. This, in turn, leads to the dissemination of supposedly valid binaries that need to be revoked later. In this paper, we present and evaluate a concept for publishing and revoking integrity protecting information for binaries, based on the Ethereum Blockchain and its underlying peer-to-peer network. Smart Contracts are used to enforce access control over the publication and revocation of integrity preserving information, whereas the peer-to-peer network serves as a fast, global communication service to keep user clients informed. The Ethereum Blockchain serves as a tamper-evident, publicly-verifiable log of published and revoked binaries. Our implementation incurs costs comparable to registration fees for centralised software distribution platforms but allows publication and revocation of individual binaries within minutes. The proposed concept can be integrated incrementally into existing software distribution platforms, such as package repositories or various app stores.

Malware in the SGX supply chain: Be careful when signing enclaves!

“…The targeted use cases address mainly the operation of IoT devices, and proposed interactions with a smart contract are mostly described at conceptual level relying on external attestation protocols or manual inspection. The work is therefore, orthogonal to our attack context, but as well as [39] it strengthens the common assumption of using blockchain, and in particular Ethereum, for its integrity guarantees.…”

“…These typically address protecting the integrity of simple binaries in a supply chain, not specifically of an SGX enclave. The most close to our distributed mitigation is the idea presented in [39]. Similar to our approach, a hash digest computed over the binary is stored in a smart contract in the Ethereum blockchain, with the purpose to detect if the binary was tampered.…”

Practical Trade-Offs in Integrity Protection for Binaries via Ethereum

“…In previous work [4], a concept was proposed on how the Ethereum blockchain can serve as a middleware to facilitate the publication and revocation of integrity protecting information for software binaries and how the underlying peer-to-peer network can be viewed as a reliable broadcast medium. Smart contracts are used to establish unique and persistent identities for software that can be managed by and transferred between software developers and maintainers.…”

SmartWitness: A Proactive Software Transparency System using Smart Contracts

“…The work by Stengele et al [46] adopts a similar approach to ours of using smart contracts to provide software transparency but model it as an access control problem. In their system, each software package is represented with a Root Software Identifier (Root SI) generated by Software Smart Contract issued by a developer.…”