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Since compiler optimization is the most common source contributing to binary code differences in syntax, testing the resilience against the changes caused by different compiler optimization settings has become a standard evaluation step for…

With the popularity of Android apps, different techniques have been proposed to enhance app protection. As an effective approach to prevent reverse engineering, obfuscation can be used to serve both benign and malicious purposes. In recent…

Binary code analysis plays an essential role in cybersecurity, facilitating reverse engineering to reveal the inner workings of programs in the absence of source code. Traditional approaches, such as static and dynamic analysis, extract…

Code obfuscation is widely adopted in modern software development to protect intellectual property and hinder reverse engineering, but it also provides attackers with a powerful means to conceal malicious logic inside otherwise legitimate…

Disassembly is a challenging task, particularly for obfuscated executables containing junk bytes, which is designed to induce disassembly errors. Existing solutions rely on heuristics or leverage machine learning techniques, but only…

Binary-only fuzzing often struggles with achieving thorough code coverage and uncovering hidden vulnerabilities due to limited insight into a program's internal dataflows. Traditional grey-box fuzzers guide test case generation primarily…

To counter software reverse engineering or tampering, software obfuscation tools can be used. However, such tools to a large degree hard-code how the obfuscations are deployed. They hence lack resilience and stealth in the face of many…

In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to normalize metamorphic and obfuscated malware down at the opcode level and hence create an advanced metamorphic malware de-obfuscation and defense system. We name this system DRLDO, for Deep…

Sphinx, a hardware-software co-design architecture for binary code and runtime obfuscation. The Sphinx architecture uses binary code diversification and self-reconfigurable processing elements to maintain application functionality while…

Bit-flip attacks (BFAs) represent a serious threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), where flipping a small number of bits in the model parameters or binary code can significantly degrade the model accuracy or mislead the model prediction in…

Vulnerability prediction is valuable in identifying security issues efficiently, even though it requires the source code of the target software system, which is a restrictive hypothesis. This paper presents an experimental study to predict…

Security experts reverse engineer (decompile) binary code to identify critical security vulnerabilities. The limited access to source code in vital systems - such as firmware, drivers, and proprietary software used in Critical…

Obfuscation techniques are a general category of software protections widely adopted to prevent malicious tampering of the code by making applications more difficult to understand and thus harder to modify. Obfuscation techniques are…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering, yet their effectiveness for binary analysis remains unexplored. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of commercial LLMs for assembly code deobfuscation.…

Android applications are usually obfuscated before release, making it difficult to analyze them for malware presence or intellectual property violations. Obfuscators might hide the true intent of code by renaming variables and/or modifying…

Malware constitutes a major global risk affecting millions of users each year. Standard algorithms in detection systems perform insufficiently when dealing with malware passed through obfuscation tools. We illustrate this studying in detail…

The threat of hardware reverse engineering is a growing concern for a large number of applications. A main defense strategy against reverse engineering is hardware obfuscation. In this paper, we investigate physical obfuscation techniques,…

Software deobfuscation is a crucial activity in security analysis and especially, in malware analysis. While standard static and dynamic approaches suffer from well-known shortcomings, Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) has recently been…

The identification of vulnerabilities is an important element in the software development life cycle to ensure the security of software. While vulnerability identification based on the source code is a well studied field, the identification…

Obfuscation is a technique for protecting hardware intellectual property (IP) blocks against reverse engineering, piracy, and malicious modifications. Current obfuscation efforts mainly focus on functional locking of a design to prevent…