Propagating Application Origin Metadata During Installation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing security systems struggle to effectively protect computing devices from various malicious attacks due to the diversity of attack types and sources.
Innovation Solution
The solution involves propagating origin information for applications during installation, where the origin indicates a trusted deployment source or source of trust. This information is stored as metadata with the application files, and a policy is applied to determine if the application's origin is trusted, thereby allowing or preventing specific actions on the computing device.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If security systems are developed to protect against attacks, then security protection capability is improved, but given the wide variety of different types of attacks and sources of attacks, it remains difficult to protect computing devices against such attacks
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the security verification process into distinct phases: origin identification during installation, metadata propagation to individual files, and policy-based access control. This segmentation allows the system to handle different attack types through specialized verification mechanisms at each stage, improving adaptability while maintaining reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary security verification by identifying the origin of application packages during installation and propagating origin metadata to all files before execution. This preliminary action establishes trust boundaries in advance, enabling the system to reliably handle diverse attacks by pre-established verification rather than reactive measures.
2Productivity
If origin information is propagated to each file during installation, then security management efficiency is improved, but additional metadata storage and processing overhead is introduced
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates lightweight metadata copies of origin information and propagates them to individual files during installation. These metadata copies contain only essential origin identifiers rather than full verification data, reducing storage overhead while enabling efficient policy-based access control and improving security management productivity.
Data Source
AI summary
An application is installed on a computing device from an application package. An origin of the application (e.g., a managed installer for an enterprise, a reputation checking service) is propagated to files written to a storage device of the computing device as part of the installation, such as by writing origin information to the storage device as metadata associated with the file. The origin information for a file, in conjunction with a policy on the computing device specifying one or more trusted origins for applications on the computing device, is used to identify whether a particular action can be taken with and/or by the file. These actions can include, for example, execution of an application from an executable file. If the origin information for a file indicates an origin that is a trusted origin specified by the policy, then the action can be performed.