Remotely assessing integrity of software applications by monitoring invariants: Present limitations and future directions

Abstract

Invariants monitoring is a software attestation technique that aims at proving the integrity of a running application by checking likely invariants, which are predicates built on variables’ values. Being very promising in literature, we developed a software protection that remotely checks invariants. However, we faced a series of issues and limitations. This paper, after presenting an extensive background on invariants and their use, reports, analyses, and categorizes the identified limitations. Our work suggests that, even if it is still promising, further studies are needed to decree if invariants monitoring could be practically used as a remote protection of software applications.