• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.167-177
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• 2011

Code obfuscation is a technique that protects the abstract data contained in a program from malicious reverse engineering and various obfuscation methods have been proposed for obfuscating intention. As the abstract data of control flow about programs is important to clearly understand whole program, many control flow obfuscation transformations have been introduced. Generally, inlining is a compiler optimization which improves the performance of programs by reducing the overhead of calling invocation. In code obfuscation, inlining is used to protect the abstract data of control flow. In this paper, we define new control flow complexity metric based on entropy theory and N-Scope metric, and then apply genetic algorithm to obtain optimal inlining results, based on the defined metric.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.41-50
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• 2011

Code obfuscation has been proposed to protect codes in a program from malicious software reverse engineering. It converts a program into an equivalent one that is more difficult to understand the program. Code obfuscation has been classified into various obfuscation technique such as layout, data, control, by obfuscating goals. In those obfuscation techniques, control obfuscation is intended to complicate the control flow in a program to protect abstract information of control flow. For protecting control flow in a program, various control obfuscation transformation techniques have been proposed. However, strategies for effectively applying a control flow obfuscation to program have not been proposed yet. In this paper, we proposed a obfuscation strategy that effectively applies a control flow obfuscation transformation to a program. We conducted experiment to show that the proposed obfuscation strategy is useful for applying a control flow transformation to a program.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.605-616
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• 2020

Obfuscation technology delays the analysis of a program by modifying internal logic such as data structure and control flow while maintaining the program's functionality. However, the application of such obfuscation technology to malicious code frequently occurs to reduce the detection rate of malware in antivirus software. The obfuscation technology applied to protect software intellectual property is applied to the malicious code in reverse, which not only lowers the detection rate of the malicious code but also makes it difficult to analyze and thus makes it difficult to identify the functionality of the malicious code. The study of reverse obfuscation techniques that can be closely restored should also continue. This paper analyzes the characteristics of obfuscated code with the option of Pack the Output File and Import Protection among detailed obfuscation technologies provided by VMProtect 3.4.0, a popular tool among commercial obfuscation tools. We present a de-obfuscation algorithm.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.724-731
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• 2018

Code obfuscation is a technology that makes programs difficult to understand for the purpose of interpreting programs or preventing forgery or tampering. Inverse reading is a technology that analyzes the meaning of origin through reverse engineering technology by receiving obfuscated programs as input. This paper is an analysis of obfuscation and reverse-toxicization technologies for binary code in a virtualized-based environment. Based on VMAttack, a detailed analysis of static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, and optimization techniques were analyzed specifically for obfuscation and reverse-dipidization techniques before obfuscating and reverse-dipulation techniques. Through this thesis, we expect to be able to carry out various research on virtualization and obfuscation. In particular, it is expected that research from stack-based virtual machines can be attempted by adding capabilities to enable them to run on register-based virtual machines.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.605-615
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• 2018

Due to the rapid growth of the Internet of Things market, the use of the C/C++ language, which is the most widely used language in embedded systems, is also increasing. To improve the quality of code in the C/C++ language and reduce development costs, it is better to use static analysis, a software verification technique that can be performed in the first half of the software development life cycle. Many programs use static analysis to verify software safety and many static analysis tools are being used and studied. In this paper, we use Clang static analysis tool to check security weakness detection performance of verified test code. In addition, we compared the static analysis results of the test codes applied with the source obfuscation techniques, layout obfuscation, data obfuscation, and control flow obfuscation techniques, and the static analysis results of the original test codes, Analyze the detection ability impact of the Clang static analysis tool.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.709-720
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• 2013

Virtualization obfuscation makes hard to analyze the code by applying virtualization to code section. Protected code by common used virtualization obfuscation technique has become known that it doesn't have restored point and also it is hard to analyze. However, it is abused to protect malware recently. So, It is been hard to analyze and take action for malware. Therefore, this paper's purpose is analyze and take action for protected malware by virtualization obfuscation technique through implement tool which can extract virtualization structure automatically and trace execution process. Hence, basic structure and operation process of virtualization obfuscation technique will be handled and analysis result of protected malware by virtualization obfuscation utilized Equation Reasoning System, one kind of program analysis. Also, we implement automatic analysis tool, extract virtualization structure from protected executable file by virtualization obfuscation technique and deduct program's execution sequence.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.129-139
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• 2013

Java bytecodes are executed not on target machine but on the Java virtual machines. Since this bytecodes use a higher level representation than binary code, it is possible to decompile most bytecodes back to Java source. Obfuscation is the technique of obscuring code and it makes program difficult to understand. However, most of the obfuscation techniques make the code size and the performance of obfuscated program bigger and slower than original program. In this paper, we proposed an effective Java obfuscation techniques using assignment statements merging that make the source program difficult to understand. The basic approach is to merge assignments statements to append side effects of statement. An additional benefit is that the size of the bytecode is reduced.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.785-802
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• 2017

As cyber threats using malicious code continue to increase, many security and vaccine companies are putting a lot of effort into analysis and detection of malicious codes. However, obfuscation techniques that make software analysis more difficult are applied to malicious codes, making it difficult to respond quickly to malicious codes. In particular, commercial obfuscation tools can quickly and easily generate new variants of malicious codes so that malicious code analysts can not respond to them. In order for analysts to quickly analyze the actual malicious behavior of the new variants, reverse obfuscation(=de-obfuscation) is needed to disable obfuscation. In this paper, general analysis methodology is proposed to de-obfuscate the software used by a commercial obfuscation tool, Themida. First, We describe operation principle of Themida by analyzing obfuscated executable file using Themida. Next, We extract original code and data information of executable from obfuscated executable using Pintool, DBI(Dynamic Binary Instrumentation) framework, and explain the implementation results of automated analysis tool which can deobfuscate to original executable using the extracted original code and data information. Finally, We evaluate the performance of our automated analysis tool by comparing the original executable with the de-obfuscated executable.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.59-69
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• 2008

Automatic obfuscation is known to be the most viable method for preventing reverse engineering intentional1y making code more difficult to understand for security purposes. In this paper, we study and implement an obfuscation method for protecting MS Visual C++ programs against attack on the intellectual property in software like reverse engineering attack. That is, the paper describes the implementation of a code obfuscator, a tool which converts a Visual C++ source program into an equivalent one that is much harder to understand. We have used ANTLR parser generator for handling Visual C++ sources, and implemented some obfuscating transformations such as 'Remove comments', 'Scramble identifiers', 'Split variables', 'Fold array', 'Insert class', 'Extend loop condition', 'Add redundant operands', and 'Insert dead code'. We have also evaluated the performance and effectiveness of the obfuscator in terms of potency, resilience, and cost. When the obfuscated source code has been compared with the original source code, it has enough effectiveness for software protection though it incurs some run-time overheads.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.700-708
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• 2015

A software birthmark is the set of characteristics of a program which can be used to identify the program. Many researchers have studied on detecting theft of java programs using some birthmarks. In case of Android apps, code obfuscation techniques are used to protect the apps against reverse-engineering and tampering. However, attackers can also use the obfuscation techniques in order to conceal a stolen program. A birthmark (feature) of an app can be alterable by code obfuscations. Therefore, it is necessary to detect Android app theft based on the birthmark which is resilient to code obfuscation. In this paper, we propose an effective Android app birthmark and app theft detection through the proposed birthmark. By analyzing some obfuscation tools, we have first selected parameter and the return types of methods as an adequate birthmark. Then, we have measured similarity of target apps using the birthmarks extracted from the apps, where some target apps are not obfuscated and the others obfuscated. The measurement results show that our proposed birthmark is effective for detecting Android app theft even though the apps are obfuscated.