Hardware-Assisted Intrusion Detection by Preserving Reference Information Integrity

Malware detectors and integrity checkers detect malicious activities by comparing against reference data. To ensure their trustworthy operation, it is crucial to protect the reference data from unauthorized modification. This paper proposes the Soteria Security Card (SSC), an append-only storage. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce the concept of an append-only storage and its application to information security. The SSC framework allows only read and append operations, and forbids over-write and erase operations. By exploiting this trait, we can protect the reference data that must be updated constantly. It is demonstrated how SSC facilitates log protection and file integrity checking.