TDVMP

et al. 2019

IEEE Access

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To protect programs from unauthorized analysis, virtualize the code based on Virtual Machine (VM) technologies is emerging as a feasible method for accomplishing code obfuscation. However, in some State-of-the-art VM-based protection approaches, the set of virtual instructions and bytecode interpreters are fixed across the whole programs. This means an experienced attacker could extract the mapping information between virtual instructions and native code from programs, and use this knowledge to uncover the mapping relationships in similar protecting applications. To address this problem, we present CoDiver (Code Virtualization Protection with Diversity), a novel VM-based code obfuscation system in this paper. The main idea of our approach is to obfuscate the mapping between the opcodes of bytecode instructions and their semantics. To achieve this goal, we first turn every protected code region into multiple parts by partition proceeding, randomize the mapping of opcodes and their semantics of each part. By this way, we could translate the bytecode instruction into different native code in different sections of the obfuscated code. This method could increase the diversity of program behavior significantly. As a result, it will be useless to learn the mapping relationship between bytecode and native code of some other programs, then migrate it into a new program. We build a prototype of CoDiver and tested it on a set of real-world applications. Experimental results show that as compared with two state-of-the-art VM-based code obfuscation approaches, our approach is more effective and could provide stronger protection with comparable runtime overhead and code size. INDEX TERMS Instruction set randomization, reverse engineering, virtualized obfuscation.

Invalidating Analysis Knowledge for Code Virtualization Protection Through Partition Diversity

Wang

et al. 2019

IEEE Access

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Exploiting Dynamic Scheduling for VM-Based Code Obfuscation

Kuang

2016 IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/Ispa

Gong

et al. 2016

Self Cite

Code virtualization built upon virtual machine (VM) technologies is emerging as a viable method for implementing code obfuscation to protect programs against unauthorized analysis. State-of-the-art VM-based protection approaches use a fixed scheduling structure where the program follows a single, static execution path for the same input. Such approaches, however, are vulnerable to certain scenarios where the attacker can reuse knowledge extracted from previously seen software to crack applications using similar protection schemes. This paper presents DSVMP, a novel VM-based code obfuscation approach for software protection. DSVMP brings together two techniques to provide stronger code protection than prior VM-based schemes. Firstly, it uses a dynamic instruction scheduler to randomly direct the program to execute different paths without violating the correctness across different runs. By randomly choosing the program execution paths, the application exposes diverse behavior, making it much more difficult for an attacker to reuse the knowledge collected from previous runs or similar applications to perform attacks. Secondly, it employs multiple VMs to further obfuscate the relationship between VM bytecode and their interpreters, making code analysis even harder. We have implemented DSVMP in a prototype system and evaluated it using a set of widely used applications. Experimental results show that DSVMP provides stronger protection with comparable runtime overhead and code size when compared to two commercial VMbased code obfuscation tools.

Exploit dynamic data flows to protect software against semantic attacks

Kuang

2017 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence &Amp; Computing, Advanced &Amp; Trusted Computed, Scalable Computing &Amp; Commun

Gong

et al. 2017

Self Cite

Unauthorized code modification based on reverse engineering is a serious threat for software industry. Virtual machine based code obfuscation is emerging as a powerful technique for software protection. However, the current code obfuscation techniques are vulnerable under semantic attacks which use dynamic profiling to transform an obfuscated program to construct a simpler program that is functionally equivalent to the obfuscated program but easier to analyze. This paper presents DSA-VMP, a novel VM-based code obfuscation technique, to address the issue of semantic attacks. Our design goal is to exploit dynamic data flows to increase the diversity of the program behaviour. Doing so can reduce the effectiveness of dynamic profiling. Our approach using multiple bytecode handlers to interpret a single bytecode and hiding the logics that determine the program execution path (it is difficult for the attacker anticipate the program execution flow). These two techniques greatly increase the diversity of the program execution where the protected code regions exhibit a complex data flow across multiple runs, making it harder and more time consuming to trace the program execution through profiling. Our approach is evaluated using a set of real-world applications. Experimental results show that DSA-VMP can well protect software against semantic attacks at the cost of little extra runtime overhead when compared to two commercial VM-based code obfuscation tools.