Defeating hardware Trojan in microprocessor cores through software obfuscation

Marcelli, Andrea; Sánchez, Ernesto; Squillero, Giovanni; Jamal, M. Usman; Imtiaz, Afnan; Machetti, Simone; Mangani, Filippo; Monti, Paolo; Pola, Davide; Salvato, Alessandro; Simili, Michele

doi:10.1109/latw.2018.8349680

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This strategy adds junk instructions which are not functional. For binaries, we can add no-operation instructions (NOP or 0x00) (Dalla Preda and Maggi 2017;Marcelli et al 2018). Besides, we can also add junk methods, such as adding defunct methods in Android smali codes (Dalla Preda and Maggi 2017).…”

Section: Junk Codesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Layered obfuscation: a taxonomy of software obfuscation techniques for layered security

Zhou

Jiang

et al. 2020

Cybersecur

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Software obfuscation has been developed for over 30 years. A problem always confusing the communities is what security strength the technique can achieve. Nowadays, this problem becomes even harder as the software economy becomes more diversified. Inspired by the classic idea of layered security for risk management, we propose layered obfuscation as a promising way to realize reliable software obfuscation. Our concept is based on the fact that real-world software is usually complicated. Merely applying one or several obfuscation approaches in an ad-hoc way cannot achieve good obscurity. Layered obfuscation, on the other hand, aims to mitigate the risks of reverse software engineering by integrating different obfuscation techniques as a whole solution. In the paper, we conduct a systematic review of existing obfuscation techniques based on the idea of layered obfuscation and develop a novel taxonomy of obfuscation techniques. Following our taxonomy hierarchy, the obfuscation strategies under different branches are orthogonal to each other. In this way, it can assist developers in choosing obfuscation techniques and designing layered obfuscation solutions based on their specific requirements.

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Section: Junk Codesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Layered obfuscation: a taxonomy of software obfuscation techniques for layered security

Zhou

Jiang

et al. 2020

Cybersecur

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“…Moreover, DETON does not require any redundancy or modification to standard microprocessors. The only work proposing a similar idea is the one reported in [29] where software diversity is achieved by substituting program instructions with equivalent ones. Nevertheless, the proposal in [29] only considers sequentially-triggered change-functionality HTHs and equivalent instructions substitution is solely employed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

DETON: DEfeating hardware Trojan horses in microprocessors through software ObfuscatioN

Cassano

Iamundo

Lopez

et al. 2022

Journal of Systems Architecture

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“…Moreover, our methodology does not require any redundancy or modification to target microprocessor. The only similar idea has been proposed in [17] where software diversity is achieved by substituting program instructions with equivalent ones during the fetching procedure. Nevertheless, the proposal in [17] only considers sequentially-triggered changefunctionality HTHs and equivalent instructions substitution is solely employed.…”

Section: Introduction and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the optimization of Software Obfuscation against Hardware Trojans in Microprocessors

Cassano

Lazzeri

Litovchenko

et al. 2022

2022 25th International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS)

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The quest of low production cost and short time-tomarket, as well as the complexity of modern integrated circuits pushed towards a globalization of the supply chain of silicon devices. Such production paradigm raised a number of security threats among which Hardware Trojan Horses (HTHs), that became a serious issue not only for academy but also for industry in the very last years. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that HTHs can be inserted into microprocessors allowing the attacker to run malicious software, to acquire root privileges or to steal secret information. In this paper we present the use of software obfuscation to protect systems against HTHs that aim at stealing information from the microprocessor while it is executing a program. Moreover, we present a Genetic Algorithm-based approach to optimize such anti-HTH methodology by maximizing the obtained obfuscation while minimizing the introduced overhead. We proved the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methodology on the Ariane 64bit RISC-V microprocessor running a set of MiBench benchmarks and cryptographic programs.

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Defeating hardware Trojan in microprocessor cores through software obfuscation

Cited by 8 publications

References 24 publications

Layered obfuscation: a taxonomy of software obfuscation techniques for layered security

Layered obfuscation: a taxonomy of software obfuscation techniques for layered security

DETON: DEfeating hardware Trojan horses in microprocessors through software ObfuscatioN

On the optimization of Software Obfuscation against Hardware Trojans in Microprocessors

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