Link-time smart card code hardening

This paper presents a feasibility study to protect smart card software against fault-injection attacks by means of link-time code rewriting. This approach avoids the drawbacks of source code hardening, avoids the need for manual assembly writing, and is applicable in conjunction with closed third-party compilers. We implemented a range of cookbook code hardening recipes in a prototype link-time rewriter and evaluate their coverage and associated overhead to conclude that this approach is promising. We demonstrate that the overhead of using an automated link-time approach is not significantly higher than what can be obtained with compile-time hardening or with manual hardening of compiler-generated assembly code

Software instrumentation using dynamic techniques

Abstract — In this paper, we describe DIOTA, a dynamic instrumentation technique. The technique correctly deals with programs that contain traditionally hard to instrument features such as data in code and code in data. The technique does not require reverse engineering, program understanding tools or heuristics about the compiler or linker used. The basic idea is that instrumented code is generated on the fly, while the original process is used for data accesses. DIOTA comes with a number of useful backends to check programs for faulty memory accesses, data races, deadlocks,... and perform basic tracing operations, e.g. tracing all memory accesses, all code being executed, to perform coverage analysis,... DIOTA has been completely implemented for the IA32 architecture. I

AADEBUG2003 XXX1 Instrumenting self-modifying code

Adding small code snippets at key points to existing code fragments is called instrumentation. It is an established technique to debug certain otherwise hard to solve faults, such as memory management issues and data races. Dynamic instrumentation can already be used to analyse code which is loaded or even generated at run time. With the advent of environments such as the Java Virtual Machine with optimizing Just-In-Time compilers, a new obstacle arises: self-modifying code. In order to instrument this kind of code correctly, one must be able to detect modifications and adapt the instrumentation code accordingly, preferably without incurring a high penalty speedwise. In this paper we propose an innovative technique that uses the hardware page protection mechanism of modern processors to detect such modifications. We also show how an instrumentor can adapt the instrumented version depending on the kind of modificiations as well as an experimental evaluation of said techniques

Instrumenting JVM`s at the machine code level

Abstract — Adding small code snippets at key points to existing code fragments is called instrumentation. It is an established technique to debug certain otherwise hard to solve faults, such as memory management issues and data races. Dynamic instru-mentation can already be used to analyse code which is loaded or even generated at run time. With the advent of environments such as the Java Virtual Machine with optimizing Just-In-Time compilers, a new obstacle arises: self-modifying code. In order to instrument this kind of code correctly, one must be able to detect modifications and adapt the instrumentation code accordingly. In this paper we propose an innovative technique that uses the hardware page protection mechanism of modern processors to detect such modifications. We also show how an instrumentor can adapt the instrumented version depending on the kind of modificiations as well as an experimental evaluation of said techniques. I