Verification of Functional Correctness of Code Diversification Techniques

Abstract

Code diversification techniques are popular code-reuse attacks defense. The majority of code diversification research focuses on analyzing non-functional properties, such as whether the technique improves security. This paper provides a methodology to verify functional equivalence between the original and a diversified binary. We present a formal notion of binary equivalence resilient to diversification. Moreover, an algorithm is presented that checks whether two binaries -one original and one diversified -satisfy that notion of equivalence. The purpose of our work is to allow untrusted diversification techniques in a safety-critical context. We apply the methodology to three state-ofthe-art diversification techniques used on the GNU Coreutils package. Overall, results show that our method can prove functional equivalence for 85,315 functions in the analyzed binaries.

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“…The idea behind application program diversity is to design a compiler that can generate multiple functionally equivalent variants of programs that are internally different [39], this method can be used in many application programs such as WebAssembly [40], a run time portable diversification system was proposed by [41] that exploit multiple heterogeneous programming system to ensure diversity. Analysis of the correctness and equivalence of the diverse code was also studied by researchers who developed methods to find the correctness of the generated variants of the code [42].…”

“…Many research efforts have been devoted to developing efficient MTD mechanisms, architectures, and strategies. Existing efforts target specific technologies such as Cloud [43], Software Defined Networks (SDN) [42,[44][45][46], SCADA systems, and IoT [47]. Despite this diversity, most developed technologies share common procedural guidelines and stages.…”