Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2004

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M. Eng.

Department

Computer Engineering and Computer Science

Committee Chair

Graham, James H.

Author's Keywords

Applied sciences

Subject

Java (Computer program language); Application software--Development

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to design, implement, and evaluate a software package that is mutli-platform and will provide software integrity management (SIM). The software package is implemented in Java and will perform two hashing algorithms, Message Digest version 5 (MD5) and Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (SHA-1), in order to verify the integrity of executable files. These records of executables and their hash value will be stored in flat database files. The database files will be stored off site on multiple servers. Each server will hold a file corresponding to the hash algorithm that was used. By storing the files off site, the users of the SIM package will be guaranteed a certain level of security and assurance that their executable files have not been tampered with. With the growing threats of security exploits and viruses, it is important for average users to be able to have this level of security. The security of the files off site will be as good as the security of the servers themselves. For this reason the server machines will be Linux machines since they are less susceptible to viruses. The server administrator will still have to keep up with security patches in order to avoid exploits, but the job will be less time consuming without having to worry about virus definitions. Initial testing using the GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) in the Linux environment showed an increase in computational speed.

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