Rachael Little, Dongpeng Xu (University of New Hampshire)

Software obfuscation is a form of code protection designed to hide the inner workings of a program from reverse engineering and analysis. Mixed Boolean Arithmetic (MBA) is one popular form that obscures simple arithmetic expressions via transformation to more complex equations involving both boolean and arithmetic operations. Most prior works focused on developing strong MBA at the source code or expression level; however, how many of them are resilient against compiler optimizations still remain unknown. In this work, we carefully inspect the strength of MBA obfuscation after various compiler optimizations. We embed MBA expressions from several popular datasets into C programs and examine how they appear post-compilation using the compilers GCC, Clang, and MSVC. Surprisingly, we discover a notable trend of reduction in MBA size and complexity after compiler optimization. We report our findings and discuss how MBA expressions are impacted by compiler optimizations.

View More Papers

podft: On Accelerating Dynamic Taint Analysis with Precise Path...

Zhiyou Tian (Xidian University), Cong Sun (Xidian University), Dongrui Zeng (Palo Alto Networks), Gang Tan (Pennsylvania State University)

Read More

How Different Tokenization Algorithms Impact LLMs and Transformer Models...

Ahmed Mostafa, Raisul Arefin Nahid, Samuel Mulder (Auburn University)

Read More

Poster: Securing IoT Edge Devices: Applying NIST IR 8259A...

Rahul Choutapally, Konika Reddy Saddikuti, Solomon Berhe (University of the Pacific)

Read More

SNITCH: Leveraging IP Geolocation for Active VPN Detection

Tomer Schwartz (Data and Security Laboratory Fujitsu Research of Europe Ltd), Ofir Manor (Data and Security Laboratory Fujitsu Research of Europe Ltd), Andikan Otung (Data and Security Laboratory Fujitsu Research of Europe Ltd)

Read More