Tutorial M3 – Algorithms for Software Protection
Dr. Christian Collberg, University of Arizona
Dr. Jasvir Nagra, Google Inc.
Monday, December 6th, Full Day
Abstract. In this tutorial we will describe techniques for software protection. These are techniques for protecting secrets contained in computer programs from being discovered, modified, or redistributed. Important applications include protecting against software piracy, license check tampering, and cheating in on-line multi-player games. With a series of interactive exercises and problems, you will get hands-on experience with methods you can use to protect your program as well as techniques that attackers use to analyze and crack applications. The attack model is very liberal: we assume that an adversary can study our program's code (maybe first disassembling or decompiling it), execute it to study its behavior (perhaps using a debugger), or alter it to make it do something different than what we intended (such as bypassing a license check). In a typical defense scenario we use code transformation techniques to add confusion to our code to make it more difficult to analyze (statically or dynamically), tamper-protection to prevent modification, and watermarking to assert our intellectual property rights (by embedding a hidden copyright notice or unique customer identifier).
Background. Software protection is a fairly new branch of computer security. It's a field that borrows techniques not only from computer security, but also from many other areas of Computer Science such as cryptography, steganography, media watermarking, software metrics, reverse engineering, and compiler optimization. The problems we work on are different from other branches of computer security: we are concerned with protecting the secrets contained within computer programs. We use the word secrets loosely, but the techniques we present in this tutorial (code obfuscation, software watermarking and fingerprinting, tamper-proofing, and birthmarking) are typically used to prevent others from exploiting the intellectual effort invested in producing a piece of software.
For example, software fingerprinting can be used to trace software pirates, code obfuscation can be used to make it more difficult to reverse engineer a program, and tamperproofing can make it harder for a hacker to remove a license check.
Outline
- Introduction. What is software protection? What problems do we work on?
- Attack Models. Who is our adversary? What techniques are at his disposal?
- Code Obfuscation. Code transformation techniques for preventing malicious reverse engineering of programs. How do we defeat static analysis? How do we defeat dynamic analysis? How can adversaries use obfuscation to affect the results of electronic voting?
- Obfuscation Theory. Theoretical background to obfuscation. What can we hide in a program? What can't we hide in a program?
- Tamperproofing. Techniques for preventing modifications of programs. How can we stop the removal of licensing checks? How can we stop cheating in on-line games? How can we prevent attacks against the TCP stack that could potentially take down the Internet?
- Watermarking. Techniques for embedding unique identifiers in programs to prevent software piracy.
- Conclusion. Directions for future research.
Prerequisites
An understanding of basic compiler/program analyis techniques is helpful, but not necessary.
About the Instructors
Dr. Christian Collberg received a BSc in Computer Science and Numerical Analysis and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lund University, Sweden. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona and has also worked at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Prof. Collberg is a leading researcher in the intellectual property protection of software, and also maintains an interest in compiler and programming language research. In his spare time he writes songs, sings, and plays guitar for The Zax and hopes one day to finish up his Great Swedish Novel.
Dr. Jasvir Nagra received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He's been a Post Doctoral scholar on the RE-TRUST project at the University of Trento where his focus was on applying obfuscation, tamperproofing and watermarking techniques to protect the integrity of software executing on a remote untrusted platform. His research interests also include the design of programming languages and its impact on the security of applications. He's currently with Google, Inc where he is building Caja, a open-sourced, secure-subset of javascript. In his spare time Jasvir dabbles with Lego and one day hopes to finish building his Turing machine made entirely out of Lego blocks.