Abstract
Code virtualization technique obfuscates programs by transforming original code to self-defined bytecode in a different instruction architecture. It is widely used in obfuscating malware for its ability to render normal analysis ineffective. Using symbolic execution to assist in deobfuscating such programs turned to be a trend in recent research. However, we found many challenges that may lead to semantic confusion in previous symbolic execution technique, and proposed a novel symbolic execution technique enhanced by time stamps to tackle these issues. For evaluation, we implemented it as a prototype of SymSem and deobfuscated programs protected by popular virtual machines. The results indicate that our method is able to accurately recover the semantics of obfuscated function trace.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (GrantNo. 61872237).
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Li, H., Zhan, Y., Jianqiang, W., Gu, D. (2020). SymSem: Symbolic Execution with Time Stamps for Deobfuscation. In: Liu, Z., Yung, M. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology. Inscrypt 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12020. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42921-8_13
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