Rachael Little, Dongpeng Xu (University of New Hampshire)

Software obfuscation is a form of code protection designed to hide the inner workings of a program from reverse engineering and analysis. Mixed Boolean Arithmetic (MBA) is one popular form that obscures simple arithmetic expressions via transformation to more complex equations involving both boolean and arithmetic operations. Most prior works focused on developing strong MBA at the source code or expression level; however, how many of them are resilient against compiler optimizations still remain unknown. In this work, we carefully inspect the strength of MBA obfuscation after various compiler optimizations. We embed MBA expressions from several popular datasets into C programs and examine how they appear post-compilation using the compilers GCC, Clang, and MSVC. Surprisingly, we discover a notable trend of reduction in MBA size and complexity after compiler optimization. We report our findings and discuss how MBA expressions are impacted by compiler optimizations.

View More Papers

Analysis of Misconfigured IoT MQTT Deployments and a Lightweight...

Seyed Ali Ghazi Asgar, Narasimha Reddy (Texas A&M University)

Read More

Passive Inference Attacks on Split Learning via Adversarial Regularization

Xiaochen Zhu (National University of Singapore & Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Xinjian Luo (National University of Singapore & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), Yuncheng Wu (Renmin University of China), Yangfan Jiang (National University of Singapore), Xiaokui Xiao (National University of Singapore), Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)

Read More

Probe-Me-Not: Protecting Pre-trained Encoders from Malicious Probing

Ruyi Ding (Northeastern University), Tong Zhou (Northeastern University), Lili Su (Northeastern University), Aidong Adam Ding (Northeastern University), Xiaolin Xu (Northeastern University), Yunsi Fei (Northeastern University)

Read More

Retrofitting XoM for Stripped Binaries without Embedded Data Relocation

Chenke Luo (Wuhan University), Jiang Ming (Tulane University), Mengfei Xie (Wuhan University), Guojun Peng (Wuhan University), Jianming Fu (Wuhan University)

Read More