• 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 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 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.493-501
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• 2020

For the obfuscation of Flow Analysis on the Android operating system, the size of the Flow Graph can be large enough to make analysis difficult. To this end, a library in the form of aar was implemented so that it could be inserted into the application in the form of an external library. The library is designed to have up to five child nodes from the entry point in the dummy code, and for each depth has 2n+1 numbers of methods from 100 to 900 for each node, so it consists of a total of 2,500 entry points. In addition, entry points consist of a total of 150 views in XML, each of which is connected via asynchronous interface. Thus, the process of creating a Inter-procedural Control Flow Graph has a maximum of 14,175E+11 additional cases. As a result of applying this to application, the Inter Procedure Control Flow Analysis too generates an average of 10,931 edges and 3,015 nodes with an average graph size increase of 36.64%. In addition, in the APK analyzing process showed that up to average 76.33MB of overhead, but only 0.88MB of execution overhead in the user's ART environment.

• 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 KIISE
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.44-53
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• 2015

Control flow information is useful in the analysis and comparison of programs. Virtualization-obfuscation hides control structures of the original program by transforming machine instructions into bytecode. Direct examination of the resulting binary reveals only the structure of the interpreter. Recovery of the original instructions requires knowledge of the virtual machine architecture, which is randomly generated and hidden. In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct original control flow using only traces generated from the obfuscated binary. We consider traces as strings and find an automaton that represents the strings. State transitions in the automaton correspond to the control transfers in the original program. We have shown the effectiveness of our method with commercial obfuscators.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2007.06d
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• pp.89-94
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• 2007

자동화된 obfuscatin은 보안 목적으로 코드를 이해하기 어렵게 만들어 역공학 공격을 방어하는데 가장 효과적인 방식이라는 알려져 있다. 본 논문에서는 역공학 공격과 같은 소프트웨어 지적재산권의 침해로부터 마이크로소프트사의 비주얼 C++소스 프로그램을 보호하기 위한 obfuscator를 구현하였다. 그리고 obfuscatio 알고리즘에 따라 potency(복잡도)를 측정하여 분석하여 각 알고리즘을 평가하였다. 또한 cost(비용)과 어셈블리 코드를 비교하여 obfuscator의 성능과 유효성을 평가하였다. 그 결과, 변환된 소스 코드가 실행시간 오버헤드를 일부 유발시키긴 하지만 프로그램 보호에는 효과적임을 알 수 있었다.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.691-705
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• 2012

Buffer overflow vulnerability is the most representative one that an attack method and its countermeasure is frequently developed and changed. This vulnerability is still one of the most critical threat since it was firstly introduced in middle of 1990s. Shellcode is a machine code which can be used in buffer overflow attack. Attackers make the shellcode for their own purposes and insert it into target host's memory space, then manipulate EIP(Extended Instruction Pointer) to intercept control flow of the target host system. Therefore, a lot of research to defend have been studied, and attackers also have done many research to bypass security measures designed for the shellcode defense. In this paper, we investigate shellcode defense and attack techniques briefly and we propose our new methodology which can hide shellcode in the 24bit BMP image. With this proposed technique, we can easily hide any shellcode executable and we can bypass the current detection and prevention techniques.