Related papers: Evaluation Methodologies in Software Protection Re…

The last years have seen an increase of Man-at-the-End (MATE) attacks against software applications, both in number and severity. However, MATE software protections are dominated by fuzzy concepts and techniques, with…

The last years have seen an increase in Man-at-the-End (MATE) attacks against software applications, both in number and severity. However, software protection, which aims at mitigating MATE attacks, is dominated by fuzzy concepts and…

In the domain of practical software protection against man-at-the-end attacks such as software reverse engineering and tampering, much of the scientific literature is plagued by the use of subpar methods to evaluate the protections'…

Evidence on the effectiveness of Man-At-The-End (MATE) software protections, such as code obfuscation, has mainly come from limited empirical research. Recently, however, an automatable method was proposed to obtain statistical models of…

This paper introduces a novel approach for the automated selection of software protections to mitigate MATE risks against critical assets within software applications. We formalize the key elements involved in protection decision-making -…

To counter man-at-the-end attacks such as reverse engineering and tampering, software is often protected with techniques that require support modules to be linked into the application. It is well-known, however, that attackers can exploit…

Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more…

Context: To effectively defend against ever-evolving cybersecurity threats, software systems should be made as secure as possible. To achieve this, software developers should understand potential vulnerabilities and apply secure coding…

To fight against the evolution of malware and its development, the specific methodologies that are applied by the malware analysts are crucial. Yet, this is something often overlooked in the relevant bibliography or in the formal and…

Man-At-The-End (MATE) attackers are almighty adversaries against whom there exists no silver-bullet countermeasure. To raise the bar, a wide range of protection measures were proposed in the literature each of which adds resilience against…

Embedded software is developed under the assumption that hardware execution is always correct. Fault attacks break and exploit that assumption. Through the careful introduction of targeted faults, an adversary modifies the control-flow or…

Searching for clues, gathering evidence, and reviewing case files are all techniques used by criminal investigators to draw sound conclusions and avoid wrongful convictions. Similarly, in software engineering (SE) research, we can develop…

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to deep learning models by implanting hidden vulnerabilities that can be activated by malicious inputs. While numerous defenses have been proposed to mitigate these attacks, the heterogeneous…

Context: Software security patch management purports to support the process of patching known software security vulnerabilities. Given the increasing recognition of the importance of software security patch management, it is important and…

Software obfuscation plays a crucial role in protecting intellectual property in software from reverse engineering attempts. While some obfuscation techniques originate from the obfuscation-reverse engineering arms race, others stem from…

Security patterns are a means to encapsulate and communicate proven security solutions. They are well-established approaches for introducing security into the software development process. Our objective is to explore the research efforts on…

Software updates reduce the opportunity for exploitation. However, since updates can also introduce breaking changes, enterprises face the problem of balancing the need to secure software with updates with the need to support operations. We…

As the number and complexity of malware attacks continue to increase, there is an urgent need for effective malware detection systems. While deep learning models are effective at detecting malware, they are vulnerable to adversarial…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for code vulnerability detection, their reliability and robustness across diverse vulnerability types have become a pressing concern. In traditional adversarial settings, code…

Embedded Systems (ES) development has been historically focused on functionality rather than security, and today it still applies in many sectors and applications. However, there is an increasing number of security threats over ES, and a…