• Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.24-39
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• 2015

Pre-retrieval query formulation is an important step for identifying local text reuse. Local reuse with high obfuscation, paraphrasing, and translation poses a challenge of finding the reused text in a document. In this paper, three pre-retrieval query formulation strategies for heuristic retrieval in case of low obfuscated, high obfuscated, and translated text are studied. The strategies used are (a) Query formulation using proper nouns; (b) Query formulation using unique words (Hapax); and (c) Query formulation using most frequent words. Whereas in case of low and high obfuscation and simulated paraphrasing, keywords with Hapax proved to be slightly more efficient, initial results indicate that the simple strategy of query formulation using proper nouns gives promising results and may prove better in reducing the size of the corpus for post processing, for identifying local text reuse in case of obfuscated and translated text reuse.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.859-869
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• 2014

In recent years, the obfuscation techniques are commonly exploited to protect malwares, so obfuscated malwares have become a big threat. Especially, it is extremely hard to analyze virtualization-obfuscated malwares based on unusual virtual machines, because the original program is hidden by the virtual machine as well as its semantics is mixed with the semantics of the virtual machine. To confront this threat, we suggest a framework to analyze virtualization-obfuscated programs based on the dynamic analysis. First, we extract the dynamic execution trace of the virtualization-obfuscated executables. Second, we analyze the traces by translating machine instruction sequences into the intermediate representation and extract the virtual machine architecture by constructing dynamic context flow graphs. Finally, we extract abstract semantics of the original program using the extracted virtual machine architecture. In this paper, we propose a method to extract the information of the original program from a virtualization-obfuscated program by some commercial obfuscation tools. We expect that our tool can be used to understand virtualization-obfuscated programs and integrate other program analysis techniques so that it can be applied to analysis of the semantics of original programs using the abstract semantics.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.93-102
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• 2023

As one of the techniques for analyzing malicious code, techniques creating a sequence or a graph of function call relationships in an executable program and then analyzing the result are proposed. Such methods generally study function calling in the executable program code through static analysis and organize function call relationships into a sequence or a graph. However, in the case of an obfuscated executable program, it is difficult to analyze the function call relationship only with static analysis because the structure/content of the executable program file is different from the standard structure/content. In this paper, we propose a dynamic analysis method to analyze the function call relationship of an obfuscated execution program. We suggest constructing a function call relationship as a graph using the proposed technique.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.137-160
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• 2008

The increasing availability of personal location data pushed by the widespread use of location-sensing technologies raises concerns with respect to the safeguard of location privacy. To address such concerns location privacy-preserving techniques are being investigated. An important area of application for such techniques is represented by Location Based Services (LBS). Many privacy-preserving techniques designed for LBS are based on the idea of forwarding to the LBS provider obfuscated locations, namely position information at low spatial resolution, in place of actual users' positions. Obfuscation techniques are generally based on the use of geometric methods. In this paper, we argue that such methods can lead to the disclosure of sensitive location information and thus to privacy leaks. We thus propose a novel method which takes into account the semantic context in which users are located. The original contribution of the paper is the introduction of a comprehensive framework consisting of a semantic-aware obfuscation model, a novel algorithm for the generation of obfuscated spaces for which we report results from an experimental evaluation and reference architecture.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1201-1215
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• 2015

Obfuscation tools can be used to protect android applications from reverse-engineering in android environment. However, obfuscation tools can also be misused to protect malicious applications. In order to evade detection of anti-virus, malware authors often apply obfuscation techniques to malicious applications. It is difficult to analyze the functionality of obfuscated malicious applications until it is deobfuscated. Therefore, a study on deobfuscation is certainly required to address the obfuscated malicious applications. In this paper, we analyze APKs which are obfuscated by commercial obfuscation tools and propose the deobfuscation method that can statically identify obfuscation options and deobfuscate it. Finally, we implement automatic identification and deobfuscation tool, then show the results of evaluation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.785-802
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• 2017

As cyber threats using malicious code continue to increase, many security and vaccine companies are putting a lot of effort into analysis and detection of malicious codes. However, obfuscation techniques that make software analysis more difficult are applied to malicious codes, making it difficult to respond quickly to malicious codes. In particular, commercial obfuscation tools can quickly and easily generate new variants of malicious codes so that malicious code analysts can not respond to them. In order for analysts to quickly analyze the actual malicious behavior of the new variants, reverse obfuscation(=de-obfuscation) is needed to disable obfuscation. In this paper, general analysis methodology is proposed to de-obfuscate the software used by a commercial obfuscation tool, Themida. First, We describe operation principle of Themida by analyzing obfuscated executable file using Themida. Next, We extract original code and data information of executable from obfuscated executable using Pintool, DBI(Dynamic Binary Instrumentation) framework, and explain the implementation results of automated analysis tool which can deobfuscate to original executable using the extracted original code and data information. Finally, We evaluate the performance of our automated analysis tool by comparing the original executable with the de-obfuscated executable.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.700-708
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• 2015

A software birthmark is the set of characteristics of a program which can be used to identify the program. Many researchers have studied on detecting theft of java programs using some birthmarks. In case of Android apps, code obfuscation techniques are used to protect the apps against reverse-engineering and tampering. However, attackers can also use the obfuscation techniques in order to conceal a stolen program. A birthmark (feature) of an app can be alterable by code obfuscations. Therefore, it is necessary to detect Android app theft based on the birthmark which is resilient to code obfuscation. In this paper, we propose an effective Android app birthmark and app theft detection through the proposed birthmark. By analyzing some obfuscation tools, we have first selected parameter and the return types of methods as an adequate birthmark. Then, we have measured similarity of target apps using the birthmarks extracted from the apps, where some target apps are not obfuscated and the others obfuscated. The measurement results show that our proposed birthmark is effective for detecting Android app theft even though the apps are obfuscated.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.44-53
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• 2015

Control flow information is useful in the analysis and comparison of programs. Virtualization-obfuscation hides control structures of the original program by transforming machine instructions into bytecode. Direct examination of the resulting binary reveals only the structure of the interpreter. Recovery of the original instructions requires knowledge of the virtual machine architecture, which is randomly generated and hidden. In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct original control flow using only traces generated from the obfuscated binary. We consider traces as strings and find an automaton that represents the strings. State transitions in the automaton correspond to the control transfers in the original program. We have shown the effectiveness of our method with commercial obfuscators.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.869-882
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• 2012

With the growth of Web services and the development of web exploit toolkits, web-based malware has increased dramatically. Using Javascript Obfuscation, recent web-based malware hide a malicious URL and the exploit code. Thus, pattern matching for network intrusion detection systems has difficulty of detecting malware. Though various methods have proposed to detect Javascript malware on a users' web browser, the overall detection is needed to counter advanced attacks such as APTs(Advanced Persistent Treats), aimed at penetration into a certain an organization's intranet. To overcome the limitation of previous pattern matching for network intrusion detection systems, a novel deobfuscating method to handle obfuscated Javascript is needed. In this paper, we propose a framework for effective hidden malware detection through an automated deobfuscation regardless of advanced obfuscation techniques with overriding JavaScript functions and a separate JavaScript interpreter through to improve jsunpack-n.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.289-301
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• 2023

Due to the development and dissemination of modern technology, anyone can easily communicate using services such as social network service (SNS) through a personal computer (PC) or smartphone. The development of these technologies has caused many beneficial effects. At the same time, bad effects also occurred, one of which was the spam problem. Spam refers to unwanted or rejected information received by unspecified users. The continuous exposure of such information to service users creates inconvenience in the user's use of the service, and if filtering is not performed correctly, the quality of service deteriorates. Recently, spammers are creating more malicious spam by distorting the image of spam text so that optical character recognition (OCR)-based spam filters cannot easily detect it. Fortunately, the level of transformation of image spam circulated on social media is not serious yet. However, in the mail system, spammers (the person who sends spam) showed various modifications to the spam image for neutralizing OCR, and therefore, the same situation can happen with spam images on social media. Spammers have been shown to interfere with OCR reading through geometric transformations such as image distortion, noise addition, and blurring. Various techniques have been studied to filter image spam, but at the same time, methods of interfering with image spam identification using obfuscated images are also continuously developing. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based spam image detection model to improve the existing OCR-based spam image detection performance and compensate for vulnerabilities. The proposed model extracts text features and image features from the image using four sub-models. First, the OCR-based text model extracts the text-related features, whether the image contains spam words, and the word embedding vector from the input image. Then, the convolution neural network-based image model extracts image obfuscation and image feature vectors from the input image. The extracted feature is determined whether it is a spam image by the final spam image classifier. As a result of evaluating the F1-score of the proposed model, the performance was about 14 points higher than the OCR-based spam image detection performance.