Software protection

A computer system's security can be compromised in many ways—a denial-of-service attack can make a server inoperable, a worm can destroy a user's private data, or an eavesdropper can reap financial rewards by inserting himself in the communication link between a customer and her bank through a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack. What all these scenarios have in common is that the adversary is an untrusted entity that attacks a system from the outside—we assume that the computers under attack are operated by benign and trusted users. But if we remove this assumption, if we allow anyone operating a computer system—from system administrators down to ordinary users—to compromise that system's security, we find ourselves in a scenario that has received comparatively little attention

Code Renewability for Native Software Protection

Software protection aims at safeguarding assets embedded in software by preventing and delaying reverse engineering and tampering attacks. This paper presents an architecture and supporting tool flow to renew parts of native applications dynamically. Renewed and diversified code and data belonging to either the original application or to linked-in protections are delivered from a secure server to a client on demand. This results in frequent changes to the software components when they are under attack, thus making attacks harder. By supporting various forms of diversification and renewability, novel protection combinations become available, and existing combinations become stronger. The prototype implementation is evaluated on a number of industrial use cases

A survey and classification of storage deduplication systems

The automatic elimination of duplicate data in a storage system commonly known as deduplication is increasingly accepted as an effective technique to reduce storage costs. Thus, it has been applied to different storage types, including archives and backups, primary storage, within solid state disks, and even to random access memory. Although the general approach to deduplication is shared by all storage types, each poses specific challenges and leads to different trade-offs and solutions. This diversity is often misunderstood, thus underestimating the relevance of new research and development. The first contribution of this paper is a classification of deduplication systems according to six criteria that correspond to key design decisions: granularity, locality, timing, indexing, technique, and scope. This classification identifies and describes the different approaches used for each of them. As a second contribution, we describe which combinations of these design decisions have been proposed and found more useful for challenges in each storage type. Finally, outstanding research challenges and unexplored design points are identified and discussed.This work is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (EDRF) through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT; Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project RED FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-010156 and the FCT by PhD scholarship SFRH-BD-71372-2010

Reverse Interpretation + Mutation Analysis = Automatic Retargeting

There are three popular methods for constructing highly retargetable compilers: (1) the compiler emits abstract machine code which is interpreted at run-time, (2) the compiler emits C code which is subsequently compiled to machine code by the native C compiler, or (3) the compiler's codegenerator is generated by a back-end generator from a formal machine description produced by the compiler writer. These methods incur high costs at run-time, compiletime, or compiler-construction time, respectively. In this paper we will describe a novel method which promises to significantly reduce the effort required to retarget a compiler to a new architecture, while at the same time producing fast and effective compilers. The basic idea is to use the native C compiler at compiler construction time to discover architectural features of the new architecture. From this information a formal machine description is produced. Given this machine description, a native code-generator can be generated by a b..

Code Obfuscation: Why is This Still a Thing?

Early developments in code obfuscation were chiefly motivated by the needs of Digital Rights Management (DRM) [7]. Other suggested applications included intellectual property protection of software [4] and code diversification to combat the monoculture problem of operating systems [2]. Code obfuscation is typically employed in security scenarios where an adversary is in complete control over a device and the software it contains and can tamper with it at will. We call such situations the Man-At-The-End (MATE) [3] scenario. MATE scenarios are the best of all worlds for attackers and, consequently, the worst of all worlds for defenders: Not only do attackers have physical access to a device and can reverse engineer and tamper with it at their leisure, they often have unbounded resources (time, computational power, etc.) to do so. Defenders, on the other hand, are often severely constrained in the types of protective techniques available to them and the amount of overhead they can tolerate. In other words, there is an asymmetry between the constraints of attackers and defenders. Moreover, DRM is becoming less prevalent (songs for sale on the Apple iTunes Store are no longer protected by DRM, for example); there are new cryptographically-based obfuscation techniques [1] that promise provably secure obfuscation; secure enclaves [5] are making it into commodity hardware, providing a safe haven for security sensitive code; and recent advances in program analysis [12] and generic de-obfuscation [13] provide algorithms that render current code obfuscation techniques impotent. Thus, one may reasonably ask the question: "Is Code Obfuscation Still a Thing?" Somewhat surprisingly, it appears that the answer is yes. In a recent report, Gartner [14] lists 19 companies active in this space (8 of which were founded since 2010) and there are still (in 2017) many papers published on code obfuscation, code de-obfuscation, anti-tamper protection, reverse engineering, and related technologies. One of the reasons for this resurgence of code obfuscation as a protective technology is that, more and more, we are faced with applications where security-sensitive code needs to run on unsecured endpoints. In this talk we will show MATE attacks that appear in many novel and unlikely scenarios, including smart cars [6], smart meters [9], mobile applications such as Snapchat and smartphone games, Internet of Things applications [8], and ad blockers in web browsers [11]. We will furthermore show novel code obfuscation techniques that increase the workload of attackers [10] and which, at least for a time, purport to restore the symmetry between attackers and defenders.NSFNational Science Foundation (NSF) [CNF-1145913]This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]