Trustworthy Whole-System Provenance for the Linux Kernel Adam Bates, Dave (Jing) Tian, and Kevin R.B. Butler, University of Florida; Thomas Moyer, MIT Lincoln Laboratory https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical-sessions/presentation/bates This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium August 12–14, 2015 • Washington, D.C. ISBN 978-1-939133-11-3 Open access to the Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX Trustworthy Whole-System Provenance for the Linux Kernel Adam Bates, Dave (Jing) Tian, Thomas Moyer Kevin R.B. Butler University of Florida MIT Lincoln Laboratory {adammbates,daveti,butler}@ufl.edu
[email protected] Abstract is presently of enormous interest in a variety of dis- In a provenance-aware system, mechanisms gather parate communities including scientific data processing, and report metadata that describes the history of each ob- databases, software development, and storage [43, 53]. ject being processed on the system, allowing users to un- Provenance has also been demonstrated to be of great derstand how data objects came to exist in their present value to security by identifying malicious activity in data state. However, while past work has demonstrated the centers [5, 27, 56, 65, 66], improving Mandatory Access usefulness of provenance, less attention has been given Control (MAC) labels [45, 46, 47], and assuring regula- to securing provenance-aware systems. Provenance it- tory compliance [3]. self is a ripe attack vector, and its authenticity and in- Unfortunately, most provenance collection mecha- tegrity must be guaranteed before it can be put to use.