Abstract
Software tamper-resistance mechanisms have increasingly assumed significance as a technique to prevent unintended uses of software. Closely related to anti-tampering techniques are obfuscation techniques, which make code difficult to understand or analyze and therefore, challenging to modify meaningfully. This paper describes a secure and robust approach to software tamper resistance and obfuscation using process-level virtualization. The proposed techniques involve novel uses of software check summing guards and encryption to protect an application. In particular, a virtual machine (VM) is assembled with the application at software build time such that the application cannot run without the VM. The VM provides just-in-time decryption of the program and dynamism for the application’s code. The application’s code is used to protect the VM to ensure a level of circular protection. Finally, to prevent the attacker from obtaining an analyzable snapshot of the code, the VM periodically discards all decrypted code. We describe a prototype implementation of these techniques and evaluate the run-time performance of applications using our system. We also discuss how our system provides stronger protection against tampering attacks than previously described tamper-resistance approaches.
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Ghosh, S., Hiser, J.D., Davidson, J.W. (2010). A Secure and Robust Approach to Software Tamper Resistance. In: Böhme, R., Fong, P.W.L., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds) Information Hiding. IH 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6387. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16435-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16435-4_3
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