EAGER: Man-at-the-End Attacks: Defenses and Evaluation Techniques

本研究考虑了这样一种场景，在这种场景中，需要保护软件免受攻击者（终端攻击者，MATE）的攻击，攻击者对软件具有物理访问权限，因此能够检查、修改和执行软件。目标是防止攻击者从软件中提取敏感信息，防止他更改软件的行为，或者至少在进行此类攻击时检测并报告。末梢人攻击会造成严重后果。例如，就个人而言，它们可能侵犯医疗记录和其他敏感个人数据的隐私和完整性；在更大的范围内，这种攻击可以使国家基础设施（如电网和互联网本身）瘫痪。该项目探索保护分布式系统免受MATE攻击的创新方法。为了完成全面的防御，该项目开发了MATE攻击模型和安全指标，正式描述了设备妥协的过程，提供了攻击工具，允许轻松测试防御算法，并设计了防御评估的社区标准。严格定义的安全度量对于将研究成果与现有和未来的方法进行比较是必要的。因此，本研究的主要目标是开发MATE防御机制的评估程序。这包括通用混淆度量和详细的红队演习协议。

This research considers a scenario in which a piece of software needs to be protected against an attacker (the man-at-the-end, MATE) who has physical access to the software and so is able to inspect, modify, and execute it. The goal is to prevent the attacker from extracting sensitive information from the software, to prevent him from making changes to the behavior of the software, or, at least, to detect and report when such attacks are underway.Man-at-the-end attacks can have serious consequences. For example, on an individual scale they can violate the privacy and integrity of medical records and other sensitive personal data; on a larger scale, such attacks can cripple national infrastructure (such as the power grid and the Internet itself).This project explores innovative approaches to protect distributed systems from MATE attacks. To accomplish comprehensive defenses, the project develops MATE attack models and security metrics that formally characterize the process of device compromise, provides attack tools to allow easy testing of defense algorithms, and devises community standards for defense evaluation. Rigorously defined security metrics are necessary for research outcomes to be compared to existing and future approaches. A primary goal of this research is therefore to develop evaluation procedures for MATE defense mechanisms. This includes both universal obfuscation metrics and detailed red-team exercise protocols.