Combating Control Flow Linearization - ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC 2017)
Conference Papers Year : 2017

Combating Control Flow Linearization

Abstract

Piracy is a persistent headache for software companies that try to protect their assets by investing both time and money. Program code obfuscation as a sub-field of software protection is a mechanism widely used toward this direction. However, effectively protecting a program against reverse-engineering and tampering turned out to be a highly non-trivial task that still is subject to ongoing research. Recently, a novel obfuscation technique called Control Flow Linearization (CFL) is gaining ground. While existing approaches try to complicate analysis by artificially increasing the control flow of a protected program, CFL takes the exact opposite direction: instead of increasing the complexity of the corresponding Control Flow Graph (CFG), the discussed obfuscation technique decreases the amount of nodes and edges in the CFG. In an extreme case, this means that the obfuscated program degenerates to one singular basic block, while still preserving its original semantics. In this paper, we present the DeMovfuscator, a system that is able to accurately break CFL obfuscation. DeMovfuscator can reconstruct the control flow, making only marginal assumptions about the execution environment of the obfuscated code. We evaluate both the performance and size overhead of CFL as well as the feasibility of our approach to deobfuscation. Overall, we show that even though CFL sounds like an ideal solution that can evade the state of the art deobfuscation approaches, it comes with its own limitations.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
449885_1_En_26_Chapter.pdf (319.47 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01649008 , version 1 (27-11-2017)

Licence

Identifiers

Cite

Julian Kirsch, Clemens Jonischkeit, Thomas Kittel, Apostolis Zarras, Claudia Eckert. Combating Control Flow Linearization. 32th IFIP International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC), May 2017, Rome, Italy. pp.385-398, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_26⟩. ⟨hal-01649008⟩
356 View
314 Download

Altmetric

Share

More