Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

3-2014

Abstract

Many software obfuscation techniques have been proposed to hide program instructions or logic and to make reverse engineering hard. In this paper, we introduce a new property in software obfuscation, namely program steganography, where certain instructions are "diffused" in others in such a way that they are non-existent until program execution. Program steganography does not raise suspicion in program analysis, and conforms to the W⊕X and mandatory code signing security mechanisms. We further implement RopSteg, a novel software obfuscation system, to provide (to a certain degree) program steganography using return-oriented programming. We apply RopSteg to eight Windows executables and evaluate the program steganography property in the corresponding obfuscated programs. Results show that RopSteg achieves program steganography with a small overhead in program size and execution time. RopSteg is the first attempt of driving return-oriented programming from the "dark side", i.e., using return-oriented programming in a non-attack application. We further discuss limitations of RopSteg in achieving program steganography.

Keywords

code obfuscation, program steganography, return-oriented programming, watermarking

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

CODASPY '14: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy: March 3-5, San Antonio, TX

First Page

265

Last Page

272

ISBN

9781450322782

Identifier

10.1145/2557547.2557572

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Embargo Period

3-23-2022

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2557547.2557572

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