[erlang-questions] How to perform running code vs. beam files integrity check

[Kenneth Lundin]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2018, 23:30 Eric Pailleau <eric.pailleau@REDACTED> wrote:

>
> Hi, considering that Erlang was invented for code change at runtime, and
> two versions of same module can run at same time in different processes...
> Hard to know if a difference is an attack or not.
> This imply to give up this feature for your app.
> An attack could change code for a single process and recover original
> module code between two checks.
> Erlang has no security.
> You claim that Erlang has no security, but that does not make Erlang less
> secure than any other language or runtime if the attacker can manipulate
> RAM for the running user space application?
>

I think it is better to concentrate on not letting an attacker have access
to RAM.

/Kenneth

>


> ---- Wojciech Ziniewicz a écrit ----
>
> Hello,
>
> We develop an application on a highly regulated market. Some regulators
> force us to protect the running code from memory modification attacks.
> Consider following attack:
> - the app is running and all modules are loaded
> - attacker gains access to RAM, scans it and modifies a value in the
> memory (or a function) so the the running code differs from the code that
> has been loaded during initialization
> - the app continues operation without noticing that code has been modified
> - a state where two different apps are located on a  single machine: the
> one in RAM and the one on the disk
>
> I'm looking for *any* measures provided by erlang vm/tooling that would
> help mitigating this attack.
>
> The beam_lib provides tools for verifying the integrity of beam files but
> some kind of access to the running code would be required to close the loop
> here.
>
> Thanks
> WZ
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