Remotely Assessing Integrity of Software Applications by Monitoring Invariants: Present Limitations and Future Directions

Viticchié, Alessio; Basile, Cataldo; Lioy, Antonio

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76687-4_5

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

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“…In particular, the shouldBePrecededBy and shouldNotBePrecededBy associations are respectively used to specify that an applied protection instance should or should not be preceded by another applied protection instance of a given kind. This is useful when choosing the best solution since one protection can make another, previously applied protection stronger (e.g., software remote attestation [26] can be made more robust if coupled with antidebugging [27]), but applying one protection can also make a later one weaker (e.g., a control flow obfuscation applied first can negatively impact the data flow analysis that checks preconditions for applying a data obfuscation), thus affecting the aggressiveness with which the data obfuscation can be applied. Furthermore, the cannotBePrecededBy relationship is used to model impossible sequences of protections that can lead to incoherent or non-compilable applications (e.g., software remote attestation is usually the last protection to be put, since altering the code after its deployment will trigger an invalid attestation).…”

Section: The Protection Meta-modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A meta-model for software protections and reverse engineering attacks

Basile

Canavese

Regano

et al. 2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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Software protection techniques are used to protect valuable software assets against man-at-the-end attacks. Those attacks include reverse engineering to steal confidential assets, and tampering to break the software's integrity in unauthorized ways. While their ultimate aims are the original assets, attackers also target the protections along their attack path. To allow both humans and tools to reason about the strength of available protections (and combinations thereof) against potential attacks on concrete applications and their assets, i.e., to assess the true strength of layered protections, all relevant and available knowledge on the relations between the relevant aspects of protections, attacks, applications, and assets need to be collected, structured, and formalized. This paper presents a software protection meta-model that can be instantiated to construct a formal knowledge base that holds precisely that information. The presented meta-model is validated against existing models and taxonomies in the domain of software protection, and by means of prototype tools that we developed to help non-modelling-expert software defenders with populating a knowledge base and with extracting and inferring practically useful information from it. All discussed tools are available as open source, and we evaluate their use as part of a software protection work flow on an open source application and industrial use cases.

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Section: The Protection Meta-modelmentioning

confidence: 99%