• 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 Software Assessment and Valuation
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.19-26
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a method for protecting Android applications against reverse engineering attacks. In this method, the server encrypts the original executable code (DEX) included in an APK file, inserts into the APK file a stub code that decrypts the encrypted DEX later at run-time, and distributes the modified APK file. The stub code includes an integrity validation code to detect attacks on itself. When a user installs and executes the APK file, the stub code verifies the integrity of itself, decrypts the encrypted DEX, and loads it dynamically to execute. Since the original DEX is distributed as an encrypted one, we can effectively protect the intellectual property. Further, by verifying the integrity of the stub code, we can prevent malicious users from bypassing our method. We applied the method to 15 Android apps, and evaluated its effectiveness. We confirmed that 13 out of them operates normally.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.93-102
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• 2023

As one of the techniques for analyzing malicious code, techniques creating a sequence or a graph of function call relationships in an executable program and then analyzing the result are proposed. Such methods generally study function calling in the executable program code through static analysis and organize function call relationships into a sequence or a graph. However, in the case of an obfuscated executable program, it is difficult to analyze the function call relationship only with static analysis because the structure/content of the executable program file is different from the standard structure/content. In this paper, we propose a dynamic analysis method to analyze the function call relationship of an obfuscated execution program. We suggest constructing a function call relationship as a graph using the proposed technique.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.672-678
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• 2021

New malware continues to increase and become advanced by every year. Although various studies are going on executable files to diagnose malicious codes, it is difficult to detect attacks that internalize malicious code threats in emails by exploiting non-executable document files, malicious URLs, and malicious macros and JS in documents. In this paper, we introduce a method of analyzing malicious code for email security through proactive detection and blocking of malicious email attacks, and propose a method for determining whether a non-executable document file is malicious based on AI. Among various algorithms, an efficient machine learning modeling is choosed, and an ML workflow system to diagnose malicious code using Kubeflow is proposed.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.51-60
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• 2016

Embedded software has requirements such as real-time and environment independency. The real-time requirement is affected from worst-case execution time of loaded tasks. Therefore, to guarantee real-time requirement, we need to determine a program's worst-case execution time using static analysis approach. However, the existing methods for worst-case execution time analysis do not consider the environment independency. Thus, in this paper, in order to provide environment independency, we propose a method for measuring task's execution time from the source codes. The proposed method measures the execution time through the control flow graph created from the source codes instead of the executable codes. However, the control flow graph created from the source code does not have information about execution time. Therefore, in order to provide this information, the proposed method identifies the relationships between statements in the source code and instructions in the executable code. By parameterizing those parts that are dependent on processors based on the relationships, it is possible to enhance the flexibility of the tool that measures the worst-case execution time.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1438-1448
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• 2019

We present a new technique, called VED (very effective debugging), for detecting and correcting division by zero errors for all types of .NET application. We use applications written in C# because C# applications are distributed through the internet and its executable format is used extensively. A tool called Immunity Debugger is used to reverse engineer executable code to get binaries of source code. With this technique, we demonstrate integer division by zero errors, the location of the error causing assembly language code, as well as error recovery done according to user preference. This technique can be extended to work for other programming languages in addition to C#. VED can work on different platforms such as Linux. This technique is simple to implement and economical because all the software used here are open source. Our aims are to simplify the maintenance process and to reduce the cost of the software development life cycle.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.85-96
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• 2008

One of the typical methods to prevent tampering and reverse engineering on executable codes is to encrypt them. This paper proposes a code block cipher method based on key chaining to encrypt the code. The block cipher by key chaining has been known to be inadequate for encrypting the code with control transfer, even though the key chaining has advantage of hiding the keys in blocks and making the individual keys different from block to block. This paper proposes a block transformation and duplication method to apply the block cipher by key chaining to the executable codes with control transfer instructions, and shows the idea works with the MIPS instruction set.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.807-819
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• 2019

Greybox fuzzing is known as an effective method to discover unknown security flaws reside in software and has been actively researched today. However, most of greybox fuzzing tools require an executable file. Because of this, a library, which cannot be executed by itself requires an additional executable file for greybox fuzzing. Generating such an executable file is challengeable because it requires both understanding of the library and fuzzing. In this research, we suggest the approach to generate an executable file automatically for a library and implement this approach as a tool based on the LLVM framework. This tool shows that executable files and seed files can be generated automatically by static/dynamic analysis of a unit test in the target project. A generated executable file is compatible with various greybox fuzzers like AFL because it has a common interface for greybox fuzzers. We show the performance of this tool as code coverage and discovered unknown security bugs using generated executable files and seed files from open source projects through this tool.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.189-194
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• 2009

Most of anti-virus programs detect and compare the signature of the malicious code to detect buffer overflow malicious code. Therefore most of anti-virus programs can't detect new or unknown malicious code. This paper introduces a new way to detect malicious code traces memory executable of essentials APIs by malicious code. To prove the usefulness of the technology, 7 sample codes were chosen for compared with other methods of 8 anti-virus programs. Through the simulation, It turns out that other anti-virus programs could detect only a limited portion of the code, because they were implemented just for detecting not heap areas but stack areas. But in other hand, I was able to confirm that the proposed technology is capable to detect the malicious code.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.3 no.8
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• pp.963-980
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• 2002

Software reengineering is making various research for solutions against problem of maintain existing systems. Reengineering has a meaning of development of software on exizting systems through the reverse engineering auf forward engineering. Most of the important concepts used in reengineering is composition that is restructuring of the existing objects. Is there a compiler that can compile a program written in a traditional procedural language (like C or Pascal) and generate a Java bytecode, rather than an executable code that runs oかy on the machine it was compiled (such as an a.out file on a Unix machine)\ulcorner This type of compiler may be very handy for today's computing environment of heterogeneous networks. In this paper we present a software system that does this job at the binary-to-binary level. It takes the compiled binary code of a procedural language and translates it into Java bytecode. To do this, we first translate into an assembler code called Jasmin [7] that is a human-readable representation of Java bytecode. Then the Jasmin assembler converts it into real Java bytecode. The system is not a compiler because it does not start at the source level. We believe this kind of translator is even more useful than a compiler because most of the executable code that is available for sharing does not come with source programs. Of course, it works only if the format of the executable binary code is known. This translation process consists of three major stages: (1) analysis stage that identifies the language constructs in the given binary code, (2) initialization stage where variables and objects are located, classified, and initialized, and (3) mapping stage that maps the given binary code into a Jasmin assembler code that is then converted to Java bytecode.