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Binary rewriting is changing the semantics of a program without having the source code at hand. It is used for diverse purposes, such as emulation (e.g., QEMU), optimization (e.g., DynInst), observation (e.g., Valgrind), and hardening (e.g., Control flow integrity enforcement). This survey gives detailed insight into the development and state-of-the-art in binary rewriting by reviewing 67 publications from 1966 to 2018. Starting from these publications, we provide an in-depth investigation of the challenges and respective solutions to accomplish binary rewriting. Based on our findings, we establish a thorough categorization of binary rewriting approaches with respect to their use-case, applied analysis technique, code-transformation method, and code generation techniques. We contribute a comprehensive mapping between binary rewriting tools, applied techniques, and their domain of application. Our findings emphasize that although much work has been done over the past decades, most of the effort was put into improvements aiming at rewriting general purpose applications but ignoring other challenges like altering throughput-oriented programs or software with real-time requirements, which are often used in the emerging field of the Internet of Things. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the first comprehensive overview on the complete binary rewriting process.

Software obfuscation has always been a controversially discussed research area. While theoretical results indicate that provably secure obfuscation in general is impossible, its widespread application in malware and commercial software shows that it is nevertheless popular in practice. Still, it remains largely unexplored to what extent today’s software obfuscations keep up with state-of-the-art code analysis and where we stand in the arms race between software developers and code analysts. The main goal of this survey is to analyze the effectiveness of different classes of software obfuscation against the continuously improving deobfuscation techniques and off-the-shelf code analysis tools. The answer very much depends on the goals of the analyst and the available resources. On the one hand, many forms of lightweight static analysis have difficulties with even basic obfuscation schemes, which explains the unbroken popularity of obfuscation among malware writers. On the other hand, more expensive analysis techniques, in particular when used interactively by a human analyst, can easily defeat many obfuscations. As a result, software obfuscation for the purpose of intellectual property protection remains highly challenging.

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TLS is currently the most widely-used protocol on the Internet to facilitate secure communications, in particular secure web browsing. TLS relies on X.509 certificates as a major building block to establish a secure communication channel. Certificate Authorities (CAs) are trusted third parties that validate the TLS certificates and establish trust relationships between communication entities. To counter prevalent attack vectors-like compromised CAs issuing fraudulent certificates and active man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks-TLS notary services were proposed as a solution to verify the legitimacy of certificates using alternative communication channels. In this paper, we are the first to present a long-term study on the operation of TLS notary services. We evaluated the services using active performance measurements over a timespan of one year and discuss the effectiveness of TLS notary services in practice. Based on our findings, we propose the usage of multiple notary services in conjunction with a semi-trusted centralized proxy approach, so as to protect arbitrarily-sized networks on the network level without the need to install any software on the client machines. Lastly, we identify multiple issues that prevent the widespread use of TLS notary services in practice and propose steps to overcome them.