Rewrite to Reinforce: Rewriting the Binary to Apply Countermeasures against Fault Injection
This work addresses the critical problem of applying last-minute security assurance to executable files for users without source code access, which is an incremental improvement in software security.
This paper explores two binary rewriting methodologies to inject countermeasures against fault injection attacks into executable files without source code access. The first method reassembles disassembly, while the second translates to a high-level IR and then back to the target architecture.
Fault injection attacks can cause errors in software for malicious purposes. Oftentimes, vulnerable points of a program are detected after its development. It is therefore critical for the user of the program to be able to apply last-minute security assurance to the executable file without having access to the source code. In this work, we explore two methodologies based on binary rewriting that aid in injecting countermeasures in the binary file. The first approach injects countermeasures by reassembling the disassembly whereas the second approach leverages a full translation to a high-level IR and lowering that back to the target architecture.