Formal verification of a program obfuscation based on mixed Boolean-arithmetic expressions

Blazy, Sandrine; Hutin, Rémi

doi:10.1145/3293880.3294103

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This framework not only characterizes when a transformation is correct but also measures its resilience, i.e., the difficulty of undoing the obfuscation. More recently, other work went in the direction of fully verified, obfuscating compilation chains [6,8,7]. Among these [8] is the most similar to ours, but it only focusses on the correctness of the transformation, and studies it in the setting of the CompCert C compiler.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Control-flow Flattening Preserves the Constant-Time Policy (Extended Version)

Busi,

Degano,

Galletta

2020

Preprint

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Obfuscating compilers protect a software by obscuring its meaning and impeding the reconstruction of its original source code. The typical concern when defining such compilers is their robustness against reverse engineering and the performance of the produced code. Little work has been done in studying whether the security properties of a program are preserved under obfuscation. In this paper we start addressing this problem: we consider control-flow flattening, a popular obfuscation technique used in industrial compilers, and a specific security policy, namely constant-time. We prove that this obfuscation preserves the policy, i.e., that every program satisfying the policy still does after the transformation. * The first two authors have been partially supported by project PRA_2018_66 DECLware: Declarative methodologies for designing and deploying applications of the Università di Pisa; the third author by MIUR project PRIN 2017FTXR7S IT MATTERS (Methods and Tools for Trustworthy Smart Systems).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Control-flow Flattening Preserves the Constant-Time Policy (Extended Version)

Busi,

Degano,

Galletta

2020

Preprint

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“…Due to its solid theoretical foundation and simplicity of implementation, MBA expression has been applied in multiple academic tools and industrial products to protect software [5][6][7][8][9]. For example, Cloakware, Irdeto, and Quarkslab apply MBA obfuscation in their commercial products [5,7].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tigress [6], an academic C source code obfuscator, encodes simple expressions into complex MBA forms. Blazy et al [8] develop a C program obfuscator, in which formally verified MBA obfuscation rules are integrated. Ma et al [9] apply MBA expressions to develop a novel dynamic software watermarking scheme.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An In-Place Simplification on Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Expressions

Liu

Zheng

et al. 2022

Security and Communication Networks

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Mixed Boolean-arithmetic (MBA) expression, which involves both bitwise operations (e.g., NOT, AND, and OR) and arithmetic operations (e.g., + , − , and ∗ ), is a software obfuscation scheme. On the other side, multiple methods have been proposed to simplify MBA expressions. Among them, table-based solutions are the most powerful simplification research. However, a fundamental limitation of the table-based solutions is that the space complexity of the transformation table drastically explodes with the number of variables in the MBA expression. In this study, we propose a novel method to simplify MBA expressions without any precomputed requirements. First, a bitwise expression can be transformed into a unified form, and we provide a mathematical proof to guarantee the correctness of this transformation. Then, the arithmetic reduction is smoothly performed to further simplify the expression and produce a concise result. We implement the proposed scheme as an open-source tool, named MBA-Flatten, and evaluate it on two comprehensive benchmarks. The evaluation results show that MBA-Flatten is a general and effective MBA simplification method. Furthermore, MBA-Flatten can assist malware analysis and boost SMT solvers’ performance on solving MBA equations.

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“…This paper is about mechanized operational semantics for compiler verification and their application to the CompCert compiler, with a focus on the Clight semantics, that significantly evolved since its first published version [9]. The Clight language is the preferred language to get guarantees from C programs and then compile them with CompCert (e.g., [18,13,11,8,21,16,33]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Mechanized Semantics to Verified Compilation: the Clight Semantics of CompCert

Blazy

2024

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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CompCert is a formally verified compiler for C that is specified, programmed and proved correct with the Coq proof assistant. CompCert was used in industry to compile critical embedded software. Its correctness proof states that the compiler does not introduce bugs. This semantic preservation property involves the formal semantics of the source and target languages of the compiler.Reasoning on C semantics to prove compiler correctness is challenging, as C is a real language that was not designed with semantics in mind. This paper presents the operational style that was designed for the C semantics of CompCert in order to facilitate the mechanized reasoning on terminating and diverging programs, and details the semantics of the Clight source language of CompCert.

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Formal verification of a program obfuscation based on mixed Boolean-arithmetic expressions

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

Control-flow Flattening Preserves the Constant-Time Policy (Extended Version)

Control-flow Flattening Preserves the Constant-Time Policy (Extended Version)

An In-Place Simplification on Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Expressions

From Mechanized Semantics to Verified Compilation: the Clight Semantics of CompCert

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