Software protection aims at protecting the integrity of software applications deployed on un-trusted hosts and being subject to illegal analysis. Within an un-trusted environment a possibly malicious user has complete access to system resources and tools in order to analyze and tamper with the application code. To address this research problem, we propose a novel binary obfuscation approach based on the deployment of an incomplete application whose code arrives from a trusted network entity as a flow of mobile code blocks which are arranged in memory with a different customized memory layout. This paper presents our approach to contrast reverse engineering by defeating static and dynamic analysis, and discusses its effectiveness.

The analysis of binary code is a common step of Man-At-The-End attacks to identify code sections crucial to implement attacks, such as identifying private key hidden in the code, identifying sensitive algorithms or tamper with the code to disable protections (e.g. license checks or DRM) embedded in binary code, or use the software in an unauthorized manner. Code Mobility can be used to thwart code analysis and debugging by removing parts of the code from the deployed software program and installing it at runtime by downloading binary code blocks from a trusted server. The proposed architecture of the code mobility protection downloads mobile code blocks, which are allocated dynamically at addresses determined at run-time; control transfers into and out of mobile code blocks are rewritten using the Diablo binaryrewriter tool.

Reverse engineering is usually the stepping stone of a variety of attacks aiming at identifying sensitive information (keys, credentials, data, algorithms) or vulnerabilities and flaws for broader exploitation. Software applications are usually deployed as identical binary code installed on millions of computers, enabling an adversary to develop a generic reverse-engineering strategy that, if working on one code instance, could be applied to crack all the other instances. A solution to mitigate this problem is represented by Software Diversity, which aims at creating several structurally different (but functionally equivalent) binary code versions out of the same source code, so that even if a successful attack can be elaborated for one version, it should not work on a diversified version. In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing software diversity from a search-based optimization point of view. The program to protect is subject to a catalogue of transformations to generate many candidate versions. The problem of selecting the subset of most diversified versions to be deployed is formulated as an optimisation problem, that we tackle with different search heuristics. We show the applicability of this approach on some popular Android apps.

Software protection aims at safeguarding assets embedded in software by preventing and delaying reverse engineering and tampering attacks. This paper 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 a number of industrial use cases. CCS Concepts: Security and privacy → Software reverse engineering; Digital rights management.