How to Kill Symbolic Deobfuscation for Free; or Unleashing the Potential of Path-Oriented Protections
This addresses software integrity for developers and security professionals by providing efficient defenses against automated reverse engineering attacks.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting software from attacks using Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) by introducing path-oriented protections, which critically counter symbolic deobfuscation with only a slight overhead.
Code obfuscation is a major tool for protecting software intellectual property from attacks such as reverse engineering or code tampering. Yet, recently proposed (automated) attacks based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) shows very promising results, hence threatening software integrity. Current defenses are not fully satisfactory, being either not efficient against symbolic reasoning, or affecting runtime performance too much, or being too easy to spot. We present and study a new class of anti-DSE protections coined as path-oriented protections targeting the weakest spot of DSE, namely path exploration. We propose a lightweight, efficient, resistant and analytically proved class of obfuscation algorithms designed to hinder DSE-based attacks. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that these approaches critically counter symbolic deobfuscation while yielding only a very slight overhead.