Application-Oriented Trust in Distributed Computing

Preserving integrity of applications being executed in remote machines is an open problem. Integrity requires that application code is not tampered with, prior to or during execution, by a rogue user or a malicious software agent. This paper presents a methodology to enforce runtime integrity of application code by means of an integrity- preserving software component that is combined with the application. The software component is a trusted logic that can be replaced continuously from a remote location during run-time. For added assurance, the software component produces continuous sequence of proofs of its proper operation that are verified remotely.