DamGate: Dynamic Adaptive Multi-feature Gating in Program Binaries

Feature creep has emerged as a serious threat due to the growing number of utilities and capabilities crammed into modern software systems. While feature elimination and de-bloating techniques can produce slimmer executables, a complete elimination of all unnecessary or unwanted features is often not possible, not only due to the tight coupling of feature-related functions/codes, but also because the usefulness/necessity of program features is often difficult to determine statically and can vary during runtime. This paper presents DamGate, a framework for dynamic feature customization, allowing vigilant management of program features at runtime to prevent violation of privacy and security policies. At the heart of this technique is the selective placement of checker functions(known as gates) into feature-constituent functions that need to be protected. Through execution gating and feature validation on the fly, DamGate provides differentiated control policy for program features and enables flexible runtime reconfiguration. The proposed framework is prototyped and evaluated using LibreOffice, a large-scale office suit. The evaluation results show that it can achieve desired feature customization with negligible gating overhead.