Abstract
Software protection has taken an important place during the last decade in order to protect legit software against reverse engineering or tampering. Virtualization is considered as one of the very best defenses against such attacks. We present a generic approach based on symbolic path exploration, taint and recompilation allowing to recover, from a virtualized code, a devirtualized code semantically identical to the original one and close in size. We define criteria and metrics to evaluate the relevance of the deobfuscated results in terms of correctness and precision. Finally we propose an open-source setup allowing to evaluate the proposed approach against several forms of virtualization.
Work partially funded by ANR and PIA under grant ANR-15-IDEX-02.
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Notes
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Solving the Tigress Challenge was presented at the French industrial conference SSTIC’17 [18]. The work presented here adds a revisited description of the method, a strong systematic experimental evaluation as well as new metrics to evaluate the accuracy of the approach.
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Such as simplifycfg and instcombine.
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Thanks to Christian Collberg for having provided us the original source codes.
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MD5 is one of the most involving examples in our benchmark.
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Salwan, J., Bardin, S., Potet, ML. (2018). Symbolic Deobfuscation: From Virtualized Code Back to the Original. In: Giuffrida, C., Bardin, S., Blanc, G. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10885. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93411-2_17
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