Extended Report on the Obfuscated Integration of Software Protections
This addresses software security against man-at-the-end attacks for developers, but appears incremental as it builds on existing obfuscation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of attackers exploiting modularity in software protections to reverse engineer code, proposing a technique that combines three cross-boundary obfuscation methods to obscure module boundaries, and demonstrates its effectiveness through experimental evaluation on realistic use cases and state-of-the-art tools.
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 the modular nature of applications and their protections to speed up the identification and comprehension process of the relevant code, the assets, and the applied protections. To counter that exploitation of modularity at different levels of granularity, the boundaries between the modules in the program need to be obfuscated. We propose to do so by combining three cross-boundary protection techniques that thwart the disassembly process and in particular the reconstruction of functions: code layout randomization, interprocedurally coupled opaque predicates, and code factoring with intraprocedural control flow idioms. By means of an elaborate experimental evaluation and an extensive sensitivity analysis on realistic use cases and state-of-the-art tools, we demonstrate our technique's potency and resilience to advanced attacks. All relevant code is publicly available online.