Design of lightweight Web page tamper-resistant mechanism for Linux

Abstract

Resisting malicious Web page tampering is critical to provide robust web services. Existing Web page tamper-resistant solutions either require extra equipments (e.g., storage equipments or content distribution systems), or suffer from significant performance degradation. In this paper, we design and implement a lightweight Web page tamper-resistant system for the Linux system. In our design, we adopt the system call interception, event-trigger mechanism, the attribute of Linux file system, and combine them together to resist tampering attempts to the Web page files. Our solution is very lightweight and does not require any additional storage equipments or content distribution systems. We implement a prototype of our mechanism on Linux with kernel version 2.6, and deploy it in a campus Web server. Experiment results show that our mechanism can effectively protect Web page files from being tampered, incurring only negligible increase in response delay and CPU utilization ratio. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.