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Thread-Based Obfuscation through Control-Flow Mangling

arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0044 • 2013
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Publication Information
Authors Rasha Salah Omar, Ahmed El-Mahdy, Erven Rohou
Keywords Not Available
Journal arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0044
Publisher Not Available
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Issue Not Available
Pages Not Available
publication.type International
Paper Link Not Available
Supplementary Materials Not Available
Abstract
The increasing use of cloud computing and remote execution have made program security especially important. Code obfuscation has been proposed to make the understanding of programs more complicated to attackers. In this paper, we exploit multi-core processing to substantially increase the complexity of programs, making reverse engineering more complicated. We propose a novel method that automatically partitions any serial thread into an arbitrary number of parallel threads, at the basic-block level. The method generates new control-flow graphs, preserving the blocks' serial successor relations and guaranteeing that one basic-block is active at a time using guards. The method generates m^ n different combinations for m threads and n basic-blocks, significantly complicating the execution state. We provide a correctness proof for the algorithm and implement the algorithm in the LLVM compilation framework.