• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.1209-1223
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• 2018

Android apps are made up of bytecode, so they are vulnerable to reverse engineering, and protection services are emerging that robustly repackage the app to compensate. Unlike cryptographic algorithms, the robustness of these protection services depends heavily on hiding the protection scheme. Therefore, there are few systematic discussions about the protection method even if destruction techniques of the protection service are various. And it is implemented according to the intuition of the developer. There is a need to discuss systematic protection schemes for robust security chains, rather than simple deployment of techniques disrupting static or dynamic analysis. In this paper, we analyze bangcle, a typical commercial Android app protection service, to examine the protection structure and vulnerable elements. We propose the requirements for robust structure and principles of protection structure.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.1553-1561
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• 2018

The source code for Android is open and easy to modify depending on the purpose. Recently, this charateristic has been exploited to bypass the runtime protection technique and extract the original executable code. Unfortunately, Android devices are so fragmented that it is difficult to verify the integrity of the system. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a technique to verify the integrity of the execution environment indirectly using the features of the application permission. Before executing the original executable code, it loads and executes the dummy DEX file to monitor for abnormal events and determine whether the system is intact. The proposed technique shows a performance overhead of about 2 seconds and shows that it can detect the bypassing technique that is currently disclosed.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.179-190
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• 2020

In the Unix-like system environment, the GOT overwrite attack is one of the traditional control flow hijacking techniques for exploiting software privileges. Several techniques have been proposed to defend against the GOT overwrite attack, and among them, the Full Relro(Relocation Read only) technique, which blocks GOT overwrites at runtime by arranging the GOT section as read-only in the program startup, has been known as the most effective defense technique. However, it entails loading delay, which limits its application to a program sensitive to startup performance, and it is not currently applied to the library due to problems including a chain loading delay problem caused by nested library dependency. Also, many compilers, including LLVM, do not apply the Full Relro technique by default, so runtime programs are still vulnerable to GOT attacks. In this paper, we propose a GOT protection scheme using the Control Flow Integrity(CFI) technique, which is currently recognized as the most suitable technique for defense against code reuse attacks. We implemented this scheme based on LLVM and applied it to the binutils-gdb program group to evaluate security, performance and compatibility. The GOT protection scheme with CFI is difficult to bypass, fast, and compatible with existing library programs.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.488-494
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• 2012

This paper classifies the self-defense techniques used by the malicious software based on their approaches, introduces the packing technique as one of the code protection methods and proposes a way to quickly analyze the packed malicious codes. Packing technique hides a malicious code and restore it at runtime. To analyze a packed code, it is initially required to find the entry point after restoration. To find the entry point, it has been used reversing the packing routine in which a jump instruction branches to the entry point. However, the reversing takes too much time because the packing routine is usually obfuscated. Instead of reversing the routine, this paper proposes an idea to search some features of the startup code in the standard library used to generate the malicious code. Through an implementation and a consequent empirical study, it is proved that the proposed approach is able to analyze malicious codes faster.