Software Diversity Measurement

Given a landscape of computer software that is made up of very few platforms and operating system types, attacks on software can often come in the form of comparing differences between instances or revisions of software. Diversifying software is an effective technique to mitigate these kinds of attacks. Software diversification is a means to generate program instances with varying program structure to an original program while still preserving functionality of the original code. Just as living, biological entities have a different make]up, so can software be diverse. Yet, this does not need to be at the expense of the general, common behaviors and working functional parameters. Cloakware Corporation is an industrial leader providing products for software security and protection. These are the only commercial products available in the market to support software diversity. This project is to study existing software diversification techniques, apply and evaluate a diversification measurement tool provided by a third party, and recommend effective directions for new diversity techniques and measurement capabilities.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Mohammad Zulkernine

Student:

Istehad Chowdhury

Partner:

Cloakware Corporation

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Queen's University