Building Scalable Document Integrity Systems
Open Access
- Author:
- Moyer, Thomas Michael
- Graduate Program:
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 31, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Patrick D. McDaniel, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Trent R. Jaeger, Committee Member
Thomas F. LaPorta, Committee Member
Constantino Lagoa, Committee Member - Keywords:
- computer security
trusted computing
web systems - Abstract:
- Web systems have become the de-facto method for exchanging information. Currently, users must blindly trust that the systems they are communicating with over a secure connection are high-integrity. Even if the remote system is able to provide proof of its integrity, the client has no easy way to verify that the content being delivered is genuine. This thesis explores the construction of document integrity systems, a mechanism for building high-integrity web systems that clearly shows that content being delivered came from a system with a known-integrity state. Web applications pose a number of different performance challenges for document integrity systems, and we develop several systems to satisfy different performance requirements. Our first system, Spork, provides high-throughput for at the expense of high latency for dynamic content. In order to address the high latency for dynamic content, we explore new cryptographic constructions that reduce the end-user's perceived latency, while maintaining the guarantees provided by a document integrity system. Finally, we develop a general framework for building document integrity systems, and explore the use of the framework to build a document integrity system for a provenance-aware database system.