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Malware authors often use cryptographic tools such as XOR encryption and block ciphers like AES to obfuscate part of the malware to evade detection. Use of cryptography may give the impression that these obfuscation techniques have some…

Machine learning (ML) models that learn and predict properties of computer programs are increasingly being adopted and deployed. These models have demonstrated success in applications such as auto-completing code, summarizing large…

Transformer-based language models for code have shown remarkable performance in various software analytics tasks, but their adoption is hindered by high computational costs, slow inference speeds, and substantial environmental impact. Model…

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,…

In the era of the internet and smart devices, the detection of malware has become crucial for system security. Malware authors increasingly employ obfuscation techniques to evade advanced security solutions, making it challenging to detect…

Obfuscation is the action of making something unintelligible. In software development, this action can be applied to source code or binary applications. The aim of this dissertation was to implement a tool for the obfuscation of C and C++…

Obfuscation of computer programs has historically been approached either as a practical but \textit{ad hoc} craft to make reverse engineering subjectively difficult, or as a sound theoretical investigation unfortunately detached from the…

Man-at-the-end (MATE) attackers have full control over the system on which the attacked software runs, and try to break the confidentiality or integrity of assets embedded in the software. Both companies and malware authors want to prevent…

Fault attacks consist in changing the program behavior by injecting faults at run-time in order to break some expected security properties. Applications are hardened against fault attack adding countermeasures. According to the state of the…

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…

Language models have proven successful across a wide range of software engineering tasks, but their significant computational costs often hinder their practical adoption. To address this challenge, researchers have begun applying various…

Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…

Software obfuscation techniques can prevent binary diffing techniques from locating vulnerable code by obfuscating the third-party code, to achieve the purpose of protecting embedded device software. With the rapid development of binary…

Tamper-resistance is a fundamental software security research area. Many approaches have been proposed to thwart specific procedures of tampering, e.g., obfuscation and self-checksumming. However, to our best knowledge, none of them can…

In contrast to software reverse engineering, there are hardly any tools available that support hardware reversing. Therefore, the reversing process is conducted by human analysts combining several complex semi-automated steps. However,…

Packing is an obfuscation technique widely used by malware to hide the content and behavior of a program. Much prior research has explored how to detect whether a program is packed. This research includes a broad variety of approaches such…

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…

Software obfuscation techniques make code more difficult to understand, without changing its functionality. Such techniques are often used by authors of malicious software to avoid detection. Reverse Engineering of obfuscated code, i.e.,…

Binary analysis is traditionally used in the realm of malware detection. However, the same technique may be employed by an attacker to analyze the original binaries in order to reverse engineer them and extract exploitable weaknesses. When…

Many cybersecurity attacks rely on analyzing a binary executable to find exploitable sections of code. Code obfuscation is used to prevent attackers from reverse engineering these executables. In this work, we focus on control flow…