System call interposition is a widely used technique to trace and modify application behavior. Over the years, numerous interposition mechanisms have been proposed, each with distinct strengths and trade-offs. Recently, advances in binary rewriting—specifically targeting x86–64 syscall and sysenter instructions—have led to new techniques that take important steps forward, with some claiming to support general-purpose use.

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 security-through-obscurity. This paper presents a rationale for adopting and standardizing the protection of software as a risk management process according to the NIST SP800-39 approach. We examine the relevant constructs, models, and methods needed for formalizing and automating the activities in this process in the context of MATE software protection. We highlight the open issues that the research community still has to address. We discuss the benefits that such an approach can bring to all stakeholders. In addition, we present a Proof of Concept (PoC) decision support system that instantiates many of the discussed construct, models, and methods and automates many activities in the risk analysis methodology for the protection of software. Despite being a prototype, the PoC’s validation with industry experts indicated that several aspects of the proposed risk management process can already be formalized and automated with our existing toolbox and that it can actually assist decision making in industrially relevant settings.

Multi-Variant Execution Environments (MVEEs) are a powerful tool for protecting legacy software against memory corruption attacks. MVEEs employ software diversity to run multiple variants of the same program in lockstep, whilst providing them with the same inputs and comparing their behavior. Well-constructed variants will behave equivalently under normal operating conditions but diverge when under attack. The MVEE detects these divergences and takes action before compromised variants can damage the host system.

This paper introduces ΔBreakpad. It extends the Breakpad crash reporting system to handle software diversity effectively and efficiently by replicating and patching the debug information of diversified software versions. Simple adaptations to existing open source compiler tools are presented that on the one hand introduce significant amounts of diversification in the code and stack layout of ARMv7 binaries to mitigate the widespread deployment of code injection and code reuse attacks, while on the other hand still supporting accurate crash reporting. An evaluation on SPEC2006 benchmarks demonstrates that the corresponding computational, storage, and communication overheads are small.

Software protection aims at safeguarding assets embedded in software by preventing and delaying reverse engineering and tampering attacks. This article presents an architecture and supporting tool flow to renew parts of native applications dynamically. Renewed and diversified code and data belonging to either the original application or to linked-in protections are delivered from a secure server to a client on demand. This results in frequent changes to the software components when they are under attack, thus making attacks harder. By supporting various forms of diversification and renewability, novel protection combinations become available and existing combinations become stronger. The prototype implementation is evaluated on several industrial use cases.

Exploit mitigations, by themselves, do not stop determined and well-resourced adversaries from compromising vulnerable software through memory corruption. Multi-variant execution environments (MVEEs) add additional assurance by executing multiple, diversified copies (variants) of the same program in lockstep while monitoring their behavior for signs of attacks (divergence). While executing multiple copies of the same program requires additional computational resources, modern MVEEs run many workloads at near-native speed and can detect adversaries before they leak secrets or achieve persistence on the host system.

Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger protection of the software assets, based on realistic assumptions about the hackers' behaviour. However, building such knowledge is difficult because hackers can hardly be involved in controlled experiments and empirical studies. The FP7 European project Aspire has given the authors of this paper the unique opportunity to have access to the professional penetration testers employed by the three industrial partners. In particular, we have been able to perform a qualitative analysis of three reports of professional penetration test performed on protected industrial code. Our qualitative analysis of the reports consists of open coding, carried out by 7 annotators and resulting in 459 annotations, followed by concept extraction and model inference. We identified the main activities: understanding, building attack, choosing and customizing tools, and working around or defeating protections. We built a model of how such activities take place. We used such models to identify a set of research directions for the creation of stronger code protections.

In this paper, we present disjoint code layouts (DCL), a technique that complements multi-variant execution[1]and W$\oplus$X protection to effectively immunize programs against control flow hijacking exploits such as return oriented programming (ROP)[2]and return-to-libc attacks[3]. DCL improves upon address space partitioning (ASP), an earlier technique presented to defeat memory exploits. Unlike ASP, our solution keeps the full virtual address space available to the protected program. Additionally, our combination of DCL with Multi-Variant Execution is transparent to both the user and the programmer and incurs much less overhead than other ROP defense tools, both in terms of run time and memory footprint.

Programs often run under strict usage conditions (e.g., license restrictions) that could be broken in case of code tampering. Possible attacks include malicious reverse engineering, tampering using static, dynamic and hybrid techniques, on standard devices as well as in labs with additional special purpose hardware equipment. ASPIRE (http://www.aspire-fp7.eu) is a European FP7 research project devoted to the elaboration of novel techniques to mitigate and prevent attacks to code integrity, to code/data confidentiality and to code lifting. This paper presents the ongoing activity to define a set of metrics aimed at quantifying the effect on code of the ASPIRE protections. The metrics have been conceived based on a measurement framework, which prescribes the identification of the relevant code features to consider and of their relationships with attacks and protections.

As described in many blog posts and in the scientific literature, exploits for software vulnerabilities are often engineered on the basis of patches. For example, “Microsoft Patch Tuesday” is often followed by “Exploit Wednesday” during which yet unpatched systems become vulnerable to patch-based exploits. Part of the patch engineering includes the identification of the vulnerable binary code by means of reverse-engineering tools and diffing add-ons. In this article we present a feedback-driven compiler tool flow that iteratively transforms code until diffing tools become ineffective enough to close the “Exploit Wednesday” window of opportunity. We demonstrate the tool's effectiveness on a set of real-world patches and against the latest version of BinDiff.

This paper studies and evaluates the extent to which automated compiler techniques can defend against timing-based side channel attacks on modern x86 processors. We study how modern x86 processors can leak timing information through side channels that relate to data flow. We study the efficiency, effectiveness, portability, predictability and sensitivity of several mitigating code transformations that eliminate or minimize key-dependent execution time variations. Furthermore, we discuss the extent to which compiler backends are a suitable tool to provide automated support for the proposed mitigations.

This paper studies and evaluates the extent to which automated compiler techniques can defend against timing-based side-channel attacks on modern x86 processors. We study how modern x86 processors can leak timing information through side-channels that relate to control flow and data flow. To eliminate key-dependent control flow and key-dependent timing behavior related to control flow, we propose the use of if-conversion in a compiler backend, and evaluate a proof-of-concept prototype implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate two ways in which programs that lack key-dependent control flow and key-dependent cache behavior can still leak timing information on modern x86 implementations such as the Intel Core 2 Duo, and propose defense mechanisms against them.