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18th Large Installation System Administration Conference — Abstract
Pp. 67–78 of the Proceedings
I3FS: An In-Kernel Integrity Checker and Intrusion Detection File System
Swapnil Patil, Anand Kashyap, Gopalan Sivathanu, and Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University
Abstract
Today, improving the security of computer systems has become an
important and difficult problem. Attackers can seriously damage the
integrity of systems. Attack detection is complex and time-consuming
for system administrators, and it is becoming more so. Current
integrity checkers and IDSs operate as user-mode utilities and they
primarily perform scheduled checks. Such systems are less effective in
detecting attacks that happen between scheduled checks. These user
tools can be easily compromised if an attacker breaks into the system
with administrator privileges. Moreover, these tools result in
significant performance degradation during the checks.
Our system, called I3FS, is an on-access integrity checking file
system that compares the checksums of files in real-time. It uses
cryptographic checksums to detect unauthorized modifications to files
and performs necessary actions as configured. I3FS is a stackable file
system which can be mounted over any underlying file system (like Ext3
or NFS). I3FS's design improves over the open-source Tripwire system
by enhancing the functionality, performance, scalability, and ease of
use for administrators. We built a prototype of I3FS in Linux. Our
performance evaluation shows an overhead of just 4% for normal user
workloads.
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