Shining Light on the Inter-procedural Code Obfuscation: Keep Pace with Progress in Binary Diffing
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Software obfuscation techniques have lost their effectiveness due to the rapid development of binary diffing techniques, which can achieve accurate function matching and identification. In this paper, we propose a new inter-procedural code obfuscation mechanism KHaos , 1 which moves the code across functions to obfuscate the function by using compilation optimizations. Three obfuscation primitives are proposed to separate, aggregate, and hide the function. They can be combined to enhance the obfuscation effect further. This article also reveals distinguishing factors on obfuscation and compiler optimization and presents novel observations to gain insights into the impact of actively utilizing compiler optimization in obfuscation. A prototype of KHaos is implemented and evaluated on a large number of real-world programs. Experimental results show that KHaos outperforms existing code obfuscations and can significantly reduce the accuracy rates of six state-of-the-art binary diffing techniques with lower runtime overhead.
DOI: 10.1145/3701992
Authors: Peihua Zhang, Chenggang Wu, Hanzhi Hu, Lichen Jia, Mingfan Peng, Jiali Xu, Mengyao Xie, Yuanming Lai, Yan Kang, Zhe Wang
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Chinese Academy of Sciences
OpenAlex ID: W4403842065