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Man-at-the-end (MATE) attacks against software programs are difficult to protect. Adversaries have complete access to the binary program and can run it under both static and dynamic analysis to find and break any software protection mechanisms put in place. Even though full-proof protection is not possible practically or theoretically, the goal of software protection should be to make it more difficult for an adversary to find program secrets by increasing either their monetary cost or time. Protection mechanisms must be easy to integrate into the software development lifecycle, or else they are of little to no use. In this paper, we evaluate the practical security of a watermarking technique known as Weaver, which is intended to support software watermarking based on a new transformation technique called executable steganography. Weaver allows hiding of identification marks directly into a program binary in a way that makes it difficult for an adversary to find and remove. We performed instruction frequency analysis on 106 programs from the GNU coreutils package to understand and define Weaver’s limitations and strengths as a watermarking technique. Our evaluation revealed that the initial prototype version of Weaver suffers from limitations in terms of standard benchmarks for steganography evaluation, such as its stealth. We found that this initial prototype of Weaver relied heavily on one type of instruction that does not frequently occur in standard programs, namely the mov instruction with an 8-byte immediate operand. Our instruction frequency analysis revealed a negative impact due to Weaver’s over-reliance on this mov instruction.
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Leave It to Weaver
Malware authors make use of several techniques to obfuscate code from reverse engineering tools such as IdaPro. Typically, these techniques tend to be effective for about three to six instructions, but eventually the tools can properly disassemble the remaining code once the tool is again synchronized with the operation codes. But this loss of synchronization can be used to hide information within the instructions – steganography. Our research explores an approach to this by presenting “Weaver”, a framework for executable steganography. “Weaver” differs from other techniques in how it hides malicious instructions: the hiding instructions are prepared by generating an assembly listing of the program and finding candidate hiding locations, the steganography instructions are prepared by creating an assembly listing of the program to obtain the operation codes to be hidden, and the “weaving” process merges the two. This “weaving” attempts to place all the steganography instructions into candidate locations found in the hiding instructions.
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- PAR ID:
- 10095288
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 8th Software Security, Protection, and Reverse Engineering Workshop (SSPREW)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 9
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Man-at-the-end (MATE) attacks against software programs are difficult to protect. Adversaries have complete access to the binary program and can run it under both static and dynamic analysis to find and break any software protection mechanisms put in place. Even though full-proof protection is not possible practically or theoretically, the goal of software protection should be to make it more difficult for an adversary to find program secrets by increasing either their monetary cost or time. Protection mechanisms must be easy to integrate into the software development lifecycle, or else they are of little to no use. In this paper, we evaluate the practical security of a watermarking technique known as Weaver, which is intended to support software watermarking based on a new transformation technique called executable steganography. Weaver allows hiding of identification marks directly into a program binary in a way that makes it difficult for an adversary to find and remove. We performed instruction frequency analysis on 106 programs from the GNU coreutils package to understand and define Weaver’s limitations and strengths as a watermarking technique. Our evaluation revealed that the initial prototype version of Weaver suffers from limitations in terms of standard benchmarks for steganography evaluation, such as its stealth. We found that this initial prototype of Weaver relied heavily on one type of instruction that does not frequently occur in standard programs, namely the mov instruction with an 8-byte immediate operand. Our instruction frequency analysis revealed a negative impact due to Weaver’s over-reliance on this mov instruction.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3289239.3291459
