I’ve just returned from the 2012 International Summer School on Information Security and Protection (ISSISP2012) held at the University of Arizona. This annual summer school brings together a mix of academic researchers and industry practitioners in the field of software protection where the main philosophy, and indeed the only viable approach available, can be summed up as “Security through Obscurity”. The goal here is to impede reverse engineering and to hide algorithms and data in the presence of disassemblers, decompilers, debuggers as well as side-channel analysis – this is the Man-at-the-End (MATE) attack. White box cryptography, I’ve learnt, is the term used to describe the protection of cryptographic primitives and keys against this kind of attack. This week I wish to highlight 3 talks/papers which I found memorable – the first 2 describe techniques to address code injection and timing side-channel attacks; the last one discusses formally verified program obfuscators.

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Mention the phrase “binary reverse engineering” or “binary analysis” and it often conjures up an image of software pirates or hacking groups. However, there are practical reasons for doing analysis on machine code. For instance, machines don’t run source code, they run machine code – how do we know it’s running correctly? Malware doesn’t usually come with source code (but they are known to leak on occasion); How do we protect our software from discovered vulnerabilities if we’re unable to re-compile the program from the original source code? For three paper Thursday this week, my contribution is to highlight three representative security applications of binary analysis, namely software testing, malware analysis and software protection. Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Binary analysis and Security →