Related papers: Towards a Theory of Special-purpose Program Obfusc…

The importance of information security dramatically increased and will further grow due to the shape and nature of the modern computing industry. Software is published at a continuously increasing pace. The Internet of Things and security…

Research in cybersecurity may seem reactive, specific, ephemeral, and indeed ineffective. Despite decades of innovation in defense, even the most critical software systems turn out to be vulnerable to attacks. Time and again. Offense and…

The design of authentication protocols, for online banking services in particular and any service that is of sensitive nature in general, is quite challenging. Indeed, enforcing security guarantees has overhead thus imposing additional…

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,…

We propose here to look at how abstract a model of a usable system can be, but still say something useful and interesting, so this paper is an exercise in abstraction and formalisation, with usability-of-design as an example target use. We…

Quantum computing leverages quantum mechanics to achieve computational advantages over classical hardware, but the use of third-party quantum compilers in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era introduces risks of intellectual…

Data analysis requires translating higher level questions and hypotheses into computable statistical models. We present a mixed-methods study aimed at identifying the steps, considerations, and challenges involved in operationalizing…

Opaque predicates are a well-established fundamental building block for software obfuscation. Simplified, an opaque predicate implements an expression that provides constant Boolean output, but appears to have dynamic behavior for static…

Formal deductive systems are very common in computer science. They are used to represent logics, programming languages, and security systems. Moreover, writing programs that manipulate them and that reason about them is important and…

Linear programming is widely used for decision-making in science, engineering, and operations research, yet in many modern applications the coefficients entering the constraints and objective are not known exactly and must be learned from…

The recent advances in the area of design obfuscation are encouraging, but may present themselves as hard to read for a non-specialist audience. This tutorial uncovers these advances in a clear language, contrasting the approaches that can…

Deobfuscating binary code remains a fundamental challenge in reverse engineering, as obfuscation is widely used to hinder analysis and conceal program logic. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in recovering semantics…

This paper presents a formal approach to specify and verify object-oriented programs written in the `programming to interfaces' paradigm. Besides the methods to be invoked by its clients, an interface also declares a set of abstract…

Oracle quantum programs are a fundamental class of quantum programs that serve as a critical bridge between quantum computing and classical computing. Many important quantum algorithms are built upon oracle quantum programs, making it…

Opacity is an important information-flow security property in the analysis of cyber-physical systems. It captures the plausible deniability of the system's secret behavior in the presence of an intruder that may access the information flow.…

Security protocols often use randomization to achieve probabilistic non-determinism. This non-determinism, in turn, is used in obfuscating the dependence of observable values on secret data. Since the correctness of security protocols is…

Formal methods were frequently shown to be effective and, perhaps because of that, practitioners are interested in using them more often. Still, these methods are far less applied than expected, particularly, in critical domains where they…

To develop trustworthy distributed systems, verification techniques and formal methods, including lightweight and practical approaches, have been employed to certify the design or implementation of security protocols. Lightweight formal…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

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…