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 presents a feasibility study to protect smart card software against fault-injection attacks by means of link-time code rewriting. This approach avoids the drawbacks of source code hardening, avoids the need for manual assembly writing, and is applicable in conjunction with closed third-party compilers. We implemented a range of cookbook code hardening recipes in a prototype link-time rewriter and evaluate their coverage and associated overhead to conclude that this approach is promising. We demonstrate that the overhead of using an automated link-time approach is not significantly higher than what can be obtained with compile-time hardening or with manual hardening of compiler-generated assembly code.

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