Related papers: CodeTrolley: Hardware-Assisted Control Flow Obfusc…

PowerShell is nowadays a widely-used technology to administrate and manage Windows-based operating systems. However, it is also extensively used by malware vectors to execute payloads or drop additional malicious contents. Similarly to…

Code obfuscation is the conversion of original source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form, aiming to prevent reverse engineering and intellectual property theft. This is a challenging task since it is crucial to…

Existing anti-malware software and reverse engineering toolkits struggle with stealthy sub-OS rootkits due to limitations of run-time kernel-level monitoring. A malicious kernel-level driver can bypass OS-level anti-virus mechanisms easily.…

Malware authors often employ code obfuscations to make their malware harder to detect. Existing tools for generating obfuscated code often require access to the original source code (e.g., C++ or Java), and adding new obfuscations is a…

Control Flow Hijacking attacks have posed a serious threat to the security of applications for a long time where an attacker can damage the control Flow Integrity of the program and execute arbitrary code. These attacks can be performed by…

Despite its ever-increasing impact, security is not considered as a design objective in commercial electronic design automation (EDA) tools. This results in vulnerabilities being overlooked during the software-hardware design process.…

This paper presents a high-level circuit obfuscation technique to prevent the theft of intellectual property (IP) of integrated circuits. In particular, our technique protects a class of circuits that relies on constant multiplications,…

Hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of academia, industry and government agencies. Effective detection mechanisms and countermeasures against such malicious designs can only be developed when there is a deep understanding of how…

Control flow obfuscation (CFO) alters the control flow path of a program without altering its semantics. Existing literature has proposed several techniques; however, a quick survey reveals a lack of clarity in the types of techniques…

Modern microcontroller software is often written in C/C++ and suffers from control-flow hijacking vulnerabilities. Previous mitigations suffer from high performance and memory overheads and require either the presence of memory protection…

Microcode is an abstraction layer used by modern x86 processors that interprets user-visible CISC instructions to hardware-internal RISC instructions. The capability to update x86 microcode enables a vendor to modify CPU behavior in-field,…

With the widespread deployment of Control-Flow Integrity (CFI), control-flow hijacking attacks, and consequently code reuse attacks, are significantly more difficult. CFI limits control flow to well-known locations, severely restricting…

JavaScript is a popular attack vector for releasing malicious payloads on unsuspecting Internet users. Authors of this malicious JavaScript often employ numerous obfuscation techniques in order to prevent the automatic detection by…

Camouflaging gate techniques are typically used in hardware security to prevent reverse engineering. Layout level camouflaging by adding dummy contacts ensures some level of protection against extracting the correct netlist. Threshold…

The importance of preventing microarchitectural timing side channels in security-critical applications has surged in recent years. Constant-time programming has emerged as a best-practice technique for preventing the leakage of secret…

This paper first describes an `obfuscating' compiler technology developed for encrypted computing, then examines if the trivial case without encryption produces much-sought indistinguishability obfuscation.

To avoid detection, adversaries often use command-line obfuscation. There are numerous techniques of the command-line obfuscation, all designed to alter the command-line syntax without affecting its original functionality. This variability…

This paper proposes a new obfuscation technique of a communication protocol that is aimed at making the reverse engineering of the protocol more complex. The obfuscation is based on the transformation of protocol message format…

Attacks targeting software on embedded systems are becoming increasingly prevalent. Remote attestation is a mechanism that allows establishing trust in embedded devices. However, existing attestation schemes are either static and cannot…

With current tools and technology, someone who has physical access to a chip can extract the detailed layout of the integrated circuit (IC). By using advanced visual imaging techniques, reverse engineering can reveal details that are meant…