• 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.