Ensuring Application Integrity: A Survey on Techniques and Tools

This paper aims at offering a compact vision of the main solutions that have been proposed to address the problem of ensuring the integrity and reliability of applications and executable code at large. In particular, our survey poses the emphasis on two of the main types of such proposals. We first discuss those techniques aiming at avoiding the execution of compromised or counterfeit code. We then analyze the mechanisms designed to contain the actions and mitigate the effects of the execution of malicious code. We argue that the presented technologies are amongst the indispensable tools to face the threat of malware, in the era of ubiquitous computing.