Harden Tamper-Proofing to Combat MATE Attack

The malicious modification on software is a major threat on software copyright. As a common protection method, tamper-proofing can detect and respond the malicious modification. However, existing works consider less about the security of tamper-proofing itself. When launching MATE (Man-At-The-End) attacks based on reverse engineering to the software equipped with embedded tamper-proofing, adversary is enabled to obtain all privileges to the execution code and device configure, which lead tamper proofing being attacked. In this paper, we design a novel tamper-proofing scheme to ensure the code integrity. Different from previous works, our tamper-proofing technique has executed in an isolated zone, Intel SGX (Software Guard Extension) enclave instances, such that the MATE attacks cannot compromise the tamper-proofing functions. Moreover, our scheme performs considerably high execution efficiency since it only introduces the constant extra cost of time and space. We deploy our work on SPECint-2006 benchmark suit. The experimental results demonstrate our scheme is light-weight for computation and storage.