34 research outputs found

    Diversification and obfuscation techniques for software security: A systematic literature review

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    Context: Diversification and obfuscation are promising techniques for securing software and protecting computers from harmful malware. The goal of these techniques is not removing the security holes, but making it difficult for the attacker to exploit security vulnerabilities and perform successful attacks.Objective: There is an increasing body of research on the use of diversification and obfuscation techniques for improving software security; however, the overall view is scattered and the terminology is unstructured. Therefore, a coherent review gives a clear statement of state-of-the-art, normalizes the ongoing discussion and provides baselines for future research.Method: In this paper, systematic literature review is used as the method of the study to select the studies that discuss diversification/obfuscation techniques for improving software security. We present the process of data collection, analysis of data, and report the results.Results: As the result of the systematic search, we collected 357 articles relevant to the topic of our interest, published between the years 1993 and 2017. We studied the collected articles, analyzed the extracted data from them, presented classification of the data, and enlightened the research gaps.Conclusion: The two techniques have been extensively used for various security purposes and impeding various types of security attacks. There exist many different techniques to obfuscate/diversify programs, each of which targets different parts of the programs and is applied at different phases of software development life-cycle. Moreover, we pinpoint the research gaps in this field, for instance that there are still various execution environments that could benefit from these two techniques, including cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and trusted computing. We also present some potential ideas on applying the techniques on the discussed environments.</p

    JITed: A Framework for JIT Education in the Classroom

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    The study of programming languages is a rich field within computer science, incorporating both the abstract theoretical portions of computer science and the platform specific details. Topics studied in programming languages, chiefly compilers or interpreters, are permanent fixtures in programming that students will interact with throughout their career. These systems are, however, considerably complicated, as they must cover a wide range of functionality in order to enable languages to be created and run. The process of educating students thus requires that the demanding workload of creating one of the systems be balanced against the time and resources present in a university classroom setting. Systems building upon these fundamental systems can become out of reach when the number of preceding concepts and thus classes are taken into account. Among these is the study of just-in-time (JIT) compilers, which marry the processes of interpreters and compilers for the purposes of a flexible and fast runtime. The purpose of this thesis is to present JITed, a framework within which JIT compilers can be developed with a time commitment and workload befitting of a classroom setting, specifically one as short as ten weeks. A JIT compiler requires the development of both an interpreter and a compiler. This poses a problem, as classes teaching compilers and interpreters typically feature the construction of one of those systems as their term project. This makes the construction of both within the same time span as is usually allotted for a single system infeasible. To remedy this, JITed features a prebuilt interpreter, that provides the runtime environment necessary for the compiler portion of a JIT compiler to be built. JITed includes an interface for students to provide both their own compiler and the functionality to determine which portions of code should be compiled. The framework allows for important concepts of both compilers in general and JIT compilers to be taught in a reasonable timeframe

    Frontiers in environmental science – editor’s picks 2021

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    Security and trust in cloud computing and IoT through applying obfuscation, diversification, and trusted computing technologies

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    Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are very widely spread and commonly used technologies nowadays. The advanced services offered by cloud computing have made it a highly demanded technology. Enterprises and businesses are more and more relying on the cloud to deliver services to their customers. The prevalent use of cloud means that more data is stored outside the organization’s premises, which raises concerns about the security and privacy of the stored and processed data. This highlights the significance of effective security practices to secure the cloud infrastructure. The number of IoT devices is growing rapidly and the technology is being employed in a wide range of sectors including smart healthcare, industry automation, and smart environments. These devices collect and exchange a great deal of information, some of which may contain critical and personal data of the users of the device. Hence, it is highly significant to protect the collected and shared data over the network; notwithstanding, the studies signify that attacks on these devices are increasing, while a high percentage of IoT devices lack proper security measures to protect the devices, the data, and the privacy of the users. In this dissertation, we study the security of cloud computing and IoT and propose software-based security approaches supported by the hardware-based technologies to provide robust measures for enhancing the security of these environments. To achieve this goal, we use obfuscation and diversification as the potential software security techniques. Code obfuscation protects the software from malicious reverse engineering and diversification mitigates the risk of large-scale exploits. We study trusted computing and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) as the hardware-based security solutions. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides security and trust through a hardware root of trust, and assures the integrity of a platform. We also study Intel SGX which is a TEE solution that guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of the code and data loaded onto its protected container, enclave. More precisely, through obfuscation and diversification of the operating systems and APIs of the IoT devices, we secure them at the application level, and by obfuscation and diversification of the communication protocols, we protect the communication of data between them at the network level. For securing the cloud computing, we employ obfuscation and diversification techniques for securing the cloud computing software at the client-side. For an enhanced level of security, we employ hardware-based security solutions, TPM and SGX. These solutions, in addition to security, ensure layered trust in various layers from hardware to the application. As the result of this PhD research, this dissertation addresses a number of security risks targeting IoT and cloud computing through the delivered publications and presents a brief outlook on the future research directions.Pilvilaskenta ja esineiden internet ovat nykyään hyvin tavallisia ja laajasti sovellettuja tekniikkoja. Pilvilaskennan pitkälle kehittyneet palvelut ovat tehneet siitä hyvin kysytyn teknologian. Yritykset enenevässä määrin nojaavat pilviteknologiaan toteuttaessaan palveluita asiakkailleen. Vallitsevassa pilviteknologian soveltamistilanteessa yritykset ulkoistavat tietojensa käsittelyä yrityksen ulkopuolelle, minkä voidaan nähdä nostavan esiin huolia taltioitavan ja käsiteltävän tiedon turvallisuudesta ja yksityisyydestä. Tämä korostaa tehokkaiden turvallisuusratkaisujen merkitystä osana pilvi-infrastruktuurin turvaamista. Esineiden internet -laitteiden lukumäärä on nopeasti kasvanut. Teknologiana sitä sovelletaan laajasti monilla sektoreilla, kuten älykkäässä terveydenhuollossa, teollisuusautomaatiossa ja älytiloissa. Sellaiset laitteet keräävät ja välittävät suuria määriä informaatiota, joka voi sisältää laitteiden käyttäjien kannalta kriittistä ja yksityistä tietoa. Tästä syystä johtuen on erittäin merkityksellistä suojata verkon yli kerättävää ja jaettavaa tietoa. Monet tutkimukset osoittavat esineiden internet -laitteisiin kohdistuvien tietoturvahyökkäysten määrän olevan nousussa, ja samaan aikaan suuri osuus näistä laitteista ei omaa kunnollisia teknisiä ominaisuuksia itse laitteiden tai niiden käyttäjien yksityisen tiedon suojaamiseksi. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkitaan pilvilaskennan sekä esineiden internetin tietoturvaa ja esitetään ohjelmistopohjaisia tietoturvalähestymistapoja turvautumalla osittain laitteistopohjaisiin teknologioihin. Esitetyt lähestymistavat tarjoavat vankkoja keinoja tietoturvallisuuden kohentamiseksi näissä konteksteissa. Tämän saavuttamiseksi työssä sovelletaan obfuskaatiota ja diversifiointia potentiaalisiana ohjelmistopohjaisina tietoturvatekniikkoina. Suoritettavan koodin obfuskointi suojaa pahantahtoiselta ohjelmiston takaisinmallinnukselta ja diversifiointi torjuu tietoturva-aukkojen laaja-alaisen hyödyntämisen riskiä. Väitöskirjatyössä tutkitaan luotettua laskentaa ja luotettavan laskennan suoritusalustoja laitteistopohjaisina tietoturvaratkaisuina. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) tarjoaa turvallisuutta ja luottamuksellisuutta rakentuen laitteistopohjaiseen luottamukseen. Pyrkimyksenä on taata suoritusalustan eheys. Työssä tutkitaan myös Intel SGX:ää yhtenä luotettavan suorituksen suoritusalustana, joka takaa suoritettavan koodin ja datan eheyden sekä luottamuksellisuuden pohjautuen suojatun säiliön, saarekkeen, tekniseen toteutukseen. Tarkemmin ilmaistuna työssä turvataan käyttöjärjestelmä- ja sovellusrajapintatasojen obfuskaation ja diversifioinnin kautta esineiden internet -laitteiden ohjelmistokerrosta. Soveltamalla samoja tekniikoita protokollakerrokseen, työssä suojataan laitteiden välistä tiedonvaihtoa verkkotasolla. Pilvilaskennan turvaamiseksi työssä sovelletaan obfuskaatio ja diversifiointitekniikoita asiakaspuolen ohjelmistoratkaisuihin. Vankemman tietoturvallisuuden saavuttamiseksi työssä hyödynnetään laitteistopohjaisia TPM- ja SGX-ratkaisuja. Tietoturvallisuuden lisäksi nämä ratkaisut tarjoavat monikerroksisen luottamuksen rakentuen laitteistotasolta ohjelmistokerrokseen asti. Tämän väitöskirjatutkimustyön tuloksena, osajulkaisuiden kautta, vastataan moniin esineiden internet -laitteisiin ja pilvilaskentaan kohdistuviin tietoturvauhkiin. Työssä esitetään myös näkemyksiä jatkotutkimusaiheista

    STATIC AND DYNAMIC ANALYSES FOR PROTECTING THE JAVA SOFTWARE EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT

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    In my thesis, I present three projects on which I have worked during my Ph.D. studies. All of them focus on software protection in the Java environment with static and dynamic techniques for control-flow and data-dependency analysis. More specifically, the first two works are dedicated to the problem of deserialization of untrusted data in Java. In the first, I present a defense system that was designed for protecting the Java Virtual Machine, along with the results that were obtained. In the second, I present a recent research project that aims at automatic generation of deserialization attacks, to help identifying them and increasing protection. The last discussed work concerns another branch of software protection: the authentication on short-distance channels (or the lack thereof) in Android APKs. In said work, I present a tool that was built for automatically identifying the presence of high-level authentication in Android apps. I thoroughly discuss experiments, limitations and future work for all three projects, concluding with general principles that bring these works together, and can be applied when facing related security issues in high-level software protection

    Jit spraying and mitigations

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    Abstract With the discovery of new exploit techniques, novel protection mechanisms are needed as well. Mitigations like DEP (Data Execution Prevention) or ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) created a significantly more difficult environment for exploitation. Attackers, however, have recently researched new exploitation methods which are capable of bypassing the operating system&apos;s memory mitigations. One of the newest and most popular exploitation techniques to bypass both of the aforementioned security protections is JIT memory spraying, introduced by Dion Blazakis In this article we will present a short overview of the JIT spraying technique and also novel mitigation methods against this innovative class of attacks. An anti-JIT spraying library was created as part of our shellcode execution prevention system

    Knowledge Capturing in Design Briefing Process for Requirement Elicitation and Validation

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    Knowledge capturing and reusing are major processes of knowledge management that deal with the elicitation of valuable knowledge via some techniques and methods for use in actual and further studies, projects, services, or products. The construction industry, as well, adopts and uses some of these concepts to improve various construction processes and stages. From pre-design to building delivery knowledge management principles and briefing frameworks have been implemented across project stakeholders: client, design teams, construction teams, consultants, and facility management teams. At pre-design and design stages, understanding the client’s needs and users’ knowledge are crucial for identifying and articulating the expected requirements and objectives. Due to underperforming results and missed goals and objectives, many projects finish with highly dissatisfied clients and loss of contracts for some organizations. Knowledge capturing has beneficial effects via its principles and methods on requirement elicitation and validation at the briefing stage between user, client and designer. This paper presents the importance and usage of knowledge capturing and reusing in briefing process at pre-design and design stages especially the involvement of client and user, and explores the techniques and technologies that are usable in briefing process for requirement elicitation

    메모리 보호를 위한 보안 정책을 시행하기 위한 코드 변환 기술

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    학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 백윤흥.Computer memory is a critical component in computer systems that needs to be protected to ensure the security of computer systems. It contains security sensitive data that should not be disclosed to adversaries. Also, it contains the important data for operating the system that should not be manipulated by the attackers. Thus, many security solutions focus on protecting memory so that sensitive data cannot be leaked out of the computer system or on preventing illegal access to computer data. In this thesis, I will present various code transformation techniques for enforcing security policies for memory protection. First, I will present a code transformation technique to track implicit data flows so that security sensitive data cannot leak through implicit data flow channels (i.e., conditional branches). Then I will present a compiler technique to instrument C/C++ program to mitigate use-after-free errors, which is a type of vulnerability that allow illegal access to stale memory location. Finally, I will present a code transformation technique for low-end embedded devices to enable execute-only memory, which is a strong security policy to protect secrets and harden the computing device against code reuse attacks.컴퓨터 메모리는 컴퓨터 시스템의 보안을 위해 보호되어야 하는 중요한 컴포넌트이다. 컴퓨터 메모리는 보안상 중요한 데이터를 담고 있을 뿐만 아니라, 시스템의 올바른 동작을 위해 공격자에 의해 조작되어서는 안되는 중요한 데이터 값들을 저장한다. 따라서 많은 보안 솔루션은 메모리를 보호하여 컴퓨터 시스템에서 중요한 데이터가 유출되거나 컴퓨터 데이터에 대한 불법적인 접근을 방지하는 데 중점을 둔다. 본 논문에서는 메모리 보호를 위한 보안 정책을 시행하기 위한 다양한 코드 변환 기술을 제시한다. 먼저, 프로그램에서 분기문을 통해 보안에 민감한 데이터가 유출되지 않도록 암시적 데이터 흐름을 추적하는 코드 변환 기술을 제시한다. 그 다음으로 C / C ++ 프로그램을 변환하여 use-after-free 오류를 완화하는 컴파일러 기술을 제시한다. 마지막으로, 중요 데이터를 보호하고 코드 재사용 공격으로부터 디바이스를 강화할 수 있는 강력한 보안 정책인 실행 전용 메모리(execute-only memory)를 저사양 임베디드 디바이스에 구현하기 위한 코드 변환 기술을 제시한다.1 Introduction 1 2 Background 4 3 A Hardware-based Technique for Efficient Implicit Information Flow Tracking 8 3.1 Introduction 8 3.2 Related Work 10 3.3 Our Approach for Implicit Flow Tracking 12 3.3.1 Implicit Flow Tracking Scheme with Program Counter Tag 12 3.3.2 tP C Management Technique 15 3.3.3 Compensation for the Untaken Path 20 3.4 Architecture Design of IFTU 22 3.4.1 Overall System 22 3.4.2 Tag Computing Core 24 3.5 Performance and Area Analysis 26 3.6 Security Analysis 28 3.7 Summary 30 4 CRCount: Pointer Invalidation with Reference Counting to Mitigate Useafter-free in Legacy C/C++ 31 4.1 Introduction 31 4.2 Related Work 36 4.3 Threat Model 40 4.4 Implicit Pointer Invalidation 40 4.4.1 Invalidation with Reference Counting 40 4.4.2 Reference Counting in C/C++ 42 4.5 Design 44 4.5.1 Overview 45 4.5.2 Pointer Footprinting 46 4.5.3 Delayed Object Free 50 4.6 Implementation 53 4.7 Evaluation 56 4.7.1 Statistics 56 4.7.2 Performance Overhead 58 4.7.3 Memory Overhead 62 4.8 Security Analysis 67 4.8.1 Attack Prevention 68 4.8.2 Security considerations 69 4.9 Limitations 69 4.10 Summary 71 5 uXOM: Efficient eXecute-Only Memory on ARM Cortex-M 73 5.1 Introduction 73 5.2 Background 78 5.2.1 ARMv7-M Address Map and the Private Peripheral Bus (PPB) 78 5.2.2 Memory Protection Unit (MPU) 79 5.2.3 Unprivileged Loads/Stores 80 5.2.4 Exception Entry and Return 80 5.3 Threat Model and Assumptions 81 5.4 Approach and Challenges 82 5.5 uXOM 85 5.5.1 Basic Design 85 5.5.2 Solving the Challenges 89 5.5.3 Optimizations 98 5.5.4 Security Analysis 99 5.6 Evaluation 100 5.6.1 Runtime Overhead 103 5.6.2 Code Size Overhead 106 5.6.3 Energy Overhead 107 5.6.4 Security and Usability 107 5.6.5 Use Cases 108 5.7 Discussion 110 5.8 Related Work 111 5.9 Summary 113 6 Conclusion and Future Work 114 6.1 Future Work 115 Abstract (In Korean) 132 Acknowlegement 133Docto

    Return-Oriented Programming on RISC-V

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    This paper provides the first analysis on the feasibility of Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) on RISC-V, a new instruction set architecture targeting embedded systems. We show the existence of a new class of gadgets, using several Linear Code Sequences And Jumps (LCSAJ), undetected by current Galileo-based ROP gadget searching tools. We argue that this class of gadgets is rich enough on RISC-V to mount complex ROP attacks, bypassing traditional mitigation like DEP, ASLR, stack canaries, G-Free, as well as some compiler-based backward-edge CFI, by jumping over any guard inserted by a compiler to protect indirect jump instructions. We provide examples of such gadgets, as well as a proof-of-concept ROP chain, using C code injection to leverage a privilege escalation attack on two standard Linux operating systems. Additionally, we discuss some of the required mitigations to prevent such attacks and provide a new ROP gadget finder algorithm that handles this new class of gadgets.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, originally published at AsiaCCS 202
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