710 research outputs found
Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild
In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a
holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation
in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches:
identifier renaming, string encryption, Java reflection, and packing. To obtain
the meaningful statistical results, we designed efficient and lightweight
detection models for each obfuscation technique and applied them to our massive
APK datasets (collected from Google Play, multiple third-party markets, and
malware databases). We have learned several interesting facts from the result.
For example, malware authors use string encryption more frequently, and more
apps on third-party markets than Google Play are packed. We are also interested
in the explanation of each finding. Therefore we carry out in-depth code
analysis on some Android apps after sampling. We believe our study will help
developers select the most suitable obfuscation approach, and in the meantime
help researchers improve code analysis systems in the right direction
Runtime protection via dataļ¬ow flattening
Software running on an open architecture, such as the PC, is vulnerable to inspection and modiļ¬cation. Since software may process valuable or sensitive information, many defenses against data analysis and modiļ¬cation have been proposed. This paper complements existing work and focuses on hiding data location throughout program execution. To achieve this, we combine three techniques: (i) periodic reordering of the heap, (ii) migrating local variables from the stack to the heap and (iii) pointer scrambling. By essentialy flattening the dataflow graph of the program, the techniques serve to complicate static dataflow analysis and dynamic data tracking. Our methodology can be viewed as a data-oriented analogue of control-flow flattening techniques. Dataflow flattening is useful in practical scenarios like DRM, information-flow protection, and exploit resistance. Our prototype implementation compiles C programs into a binary for which every access to the heap is redirected through a memory management unit. Stack-based variables may be migrated to the heap, while pointer accesses and arithmetic may be scrambled and redirected. We evaluate our approach experimentally on the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suit
Eight years of rider measurement in the Android malware ecosystem: evolution and lessons learned
Despite the growing threat posed by Android malware,
the research community is still lacking a comprehensive
view of common behaviors and trends exposed by malware families
active on the platform. Without such view, the researchers
incur the risk of developing systems that only detect outdated
threats, missing the most recent ones. In this paper, we conduct
the largest measurement of Android malware behavior to date,
analyzing over 1.2 million malware samples that belong to 1.2K
families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). We
aim at understanding how the behavior of Android malware
has evolved over time, focusing on repackaging malware. In
this type of threats different innocuous apps are piggybacked
with a malicious payload (rider), allowing inexpensive malware
manufacturing.
One of the main challenges posed when studying repackaged
malware is slicing the app to split benign components apart from
the malicious ones. To address this problem, we use differential
analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the
campaign and study the behavior of malicious riders alone. Our
analysis framework relies on collective repositories and recent
advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from
multiple anti-virus vendors. We find that since its infancy in
2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed significantly,
both in the type of malicious activity performed by the malicious
samples and in the level of obfuscation used by malware to avoid
detection. We then show that our framework can aid analysts
who attempt to study unknown malware families. Finally, we
discuss what our findings mean for Android malware detection
research, highlighting areas that need further attention by the
research community.Accepted manuscrip
Metamorphic Viruses with Built-In Buffer Overflow
Metamorphic computer viruses change their structureāand thereby their signatureāeach time they infect a system. Metamorphic viruses are potentially one of the most dangerous types of computer viruses because they are difficult to detect using signature-based methods. Most anti-virus software today is based on signature detection techniques. In this project, we create and analyze a metamorphic virus toolkit which creates viruses with a built-in buffer overflow. The buffer overflow serves to obfuscate the entry point of the actual virus, thereby making detection more challenging. We show that the resulting viruses successfully evade detection by commercial virus scanners. Several modern operating systems (e.g., Windows Vista and Windows 7) employ address space layout randomization (ASLR), which is designed to prevent most buffer overflow attacks. We show that our proposed buffer overflow technique succeeds, even in the presence of ASLR. Finally, we consider possible defenses against our proposed technique
A Survey on Software Protection Techniques against Various Attacks
Software security and protection plays an important role in software engineering. Considerable attempts have been made to enhance the security of the computer systems because of various available software piracy and virus attacks. Preventing attacks of software will have a huge influence on economic development. Thus, it is very vital to develop approaches that protect software from threats. There are various threats such as piracy, reverse engineering, tampering etc., exploits critical and poorly protected software. Thus, thorough threat analysis and new software protection schemes, needed to protect software from analysis and tampering attacks becomes very necessary. Various techniques are available in the literature for software protection from various attacks. This paper analyses the various techniques available in the literature for software protection. The functionalities and the characteristic features are various software protection techniques have been analyzed in this paper. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the existing software protection techniques and develop an efficient approach which would overcome the drawbacks of the existing techniques
Malicious cryptography techniques for unreversable (malicious or not) binaries
Fighting against computer malware require a mandatory step of reverse
engineering. As soon as the code has been disassemblied/decompiled (including a
dynamic analysis step), there is a hope to understand what the malware actually
does and to implement a detection mean. This also applies to protection of
software whenever one wishes to analyze them. In this paper, we show how to
amour code in such a way that reserse engineering techniques (static and
dymanic) are absolutely impossible by combining malicious cryptography
techniques developped in our laboratory and new types of programming (k-ary
codes). Suitable encryption algorithms combined with new cryptanalytic
approaches to ease the protection of (malicious or not) binaries, enable to
provide both total code armouring and large scale polymorphic features at the
same time. A simple 400 Kb of executable code enables to produce a binary code
and around mutated forms natively while going far beyond the old
concept of decryptor.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, accepted for presentation at H2HC'1
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