Tailored source code transformations to synthesize computationally diverse program variants

Abstract

The predictability of program execution provides attackers a rich source of knowledge who can exploit it to spy or remotely control the program. Moving target defense addresses this issue by constantly switching between many diverse variants of a program, which reduces the certainty that an attacker can have about the program execution. The effectiveness of this approach relies on the availability of a large number of software variants that exhibit different executions. However, current approaches rely on the natural diversity provided by off-the-shelf components, which is very limited. In this paper, we explore the automatic synthesis of large sets of program variants, called sosies. Sosies provide the same expected functionality as the original program, while exhibiting different executions. They are said to be computationally diverse.This work addresses two objectives: comparing different transformations for increasing the likelihood of sosie synthesis (densifying the search space for sosies); demonstrating computation diversity in synthesized sosies. We synthesized 30 184 sosies in total, for 9 large, real-world, open source applications. For all these programs we identified one type of program analysis that systematically increases the density of sosies; we measured computation diversity for sosies of 3 programs and found diversity in method calls or data in more than 40% of sosies. This is a step towards controlled massive unpredictability of software.

A Diversity Model Based on Failure Distribution and Its Application in Safety Cases

“…For example, an approach synthesizing program variants automatically has been developed and proposed to increase system security [33]. At a given time, this technique randomly selects one program from a population of computationally diverse program variants (Sosies) to make it hard for hackers to focus on program features to attack.…”

ScapeGoat: Spotting abnormal resource usage in component-based reconfigurable software systems

“…Using the diversification technique described in [46], we synthesized 20 sosies of the MdMS workers. These sosies are used to execute the application with a varying number of back-ends (from 4 to 10).…”

“…This proactive diversification of MdMS targets safety [44] and security [45] purposes. In particular, we have used our recent technique for the automatic synthesis of sosie programs [46] in order to automatically diversify the workers. A sosie is a variant of a program that exhibits the same functionality (passes the same test suite) and a diverse computation (different control or data flow).…”

Evolvability and robustness in artificial evolving systems: three perturbations

“…Schulte et al touch on the ways in which the software mutational robustness they document might be employed to generate software diversity. Their method has already been employed and cited during the time interval between the online publication of their paper and the printed version [4].Our second paper on robustness returns to the original context in which robustness was conceived: homeostasis, the organism as a robust dynamical system. The paper "Self-repair ability of evolved self-assembling systems in cellular automata" [13] by CanÖztürkeri and Colin Johnson investigates self-repair, a form of robustness in which systems are "able to reconfigure themselves following disruptions to bring them back into a defined normal state."…”

“…Schulte et al touch on the ways in which the software mutational robustness they document might be employed to generate software diversity. Their method has already been employed and cited during the time interval between the online publication of their paper and the printed version [4].…”