Today’s software programs are bloating and have become extremely complex. As there is typically no internal isolation among modules in a program, a vulnerability can be exploited to corrupt the memory and take control of the whole program. Program modularization is thus a promising security mechanism that splits a complex program into smaller modules, so that memory-access instructions can be constrained from corrupting irrelevant modules. A general approach to realizing program modularization is dependence analysis which determines if an instruction is independent of specific code or data; and if so, it can be modularized. Unfortunately, dependence analysis in complex programs is generally considered infeasible, due to problems in data-flow analysis, such as unknown indirect-call targets, pointer aliasing, and path explosion. As a result, we have not seen practical automated program modularization built on dependence analysis. This paper presents a breakthrough---Type-based dependence analysis for Program Modularization (TyPM). Its goal is to determine which modules in a program can never pass a type of object (including references) to a memory-access instruction; therefore, objects of this type that are created by these modules can never be valid targets of the instruction. The idea is to employ a type-based analysis to first determine which types of data flows can take place between two modules, and then transitively resolve all dependent modules of a memory-access instruction, with respect to the specific type. Such an approach avoids the data-flow analysis and can be practical. We develop two important security applications based on TyPM: refining indirect-call targets and protecting critical data structures. We extensively evaluate TyPM with various system software, including an OS kernel, a hypervisor, UEFI firmware, and a browser. Results show that on average TyPM additionally refines indirect-call targets produced by the state of the art by 31%-91%. TyPM can also remove 99.9% of modules for memory-write instructions to prevent them from corrupting critical data structures in the Linux kernel.
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Low-Cost and Secure Firmware Obfuscation Method for Protecting Electronic Systems from Cloning
The continuous growth of the cloning of electronic devices poses a severe threat to our critical infrastructure that uses the Internet, as cloned devices can transmit secret information and cause security concerns. Cloned devices can also be unreliable as they may be manufactured with inferior quality materials, and they may have many defects as they may not be tested properly. It is thus extremely important to protect these electronic devices from cloning. An efficient way to prevent a device being cloned is to prevent the firmware from being copied because, without the proper firmware, the device will not function like the original. In this paper, we present a novel firmware obfuscation method without encrypting the entire memory. The firmware is obfuscated by swapping a subset of instructions. The instructions to be swapped are specifically chosen so that an attacker cannot discover their location. During operation, the hardware reconstructs the original program using a PUF-generated identifier (ID) and a small memory that stores the swapped instructions. An adversary cannot make a program work completely without knowing which instructions have been swapped, as the program will execute in the wrong sequence and produce the incorrect result. Our proposed solution requires only a small overhead to reconstruct the firmware, making it practical for devices with strict resource constraints. This solution also allows remote updates of new obfuscated firmware without any modification and is practical for the rising trend of ubiquitous computing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1755733
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10088997
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal
- ISSN:
- 2372-2541
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2018.2890277
