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Obfuscating LLVM Intermediate Representation Source Code with NSGA-II

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International Joint Conference 15th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS 2022) 13th International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (ICEUTE 2022) (CISIS 2022, ICEUTE 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 532))

Abstract

With the generalisation of distributed computing paradigms to sustain the surging demands for massive processing and data-analytic capabilities, the protection of the intellectual property tied to the executed programs transferred onto these remote shared platforms becomes critical. A more and more popular solution to this problem consists in applying obfuscating techniques, in particular at the source code level. Informally, the goal of obfuscation is to conceal the purpose of a program or its logic without altering its functionality, thus preventing reverse-engineering on the program even with the help of computing resources. This allows to protect software against plagiarism, tampering, or finding vulnerabilities that could be used for different kinds of attacks. The many advantages of code obfuscation, together with its low cost, makes it a popular technique. This paper proposes a novel methodology for source code obfuscation relying on the reference LLVM compiler infrastructure that can be used together with other traditional obfuscation techniques, making the code more robust against reverse engineering attacks. The problem is defined as a Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization (MOCO) problem, where the goal is to find sequences of LLVM optimizations that lead to highly obfuscated versions of the original code. These transformations are applied to the back-end pseudo-assembly code (i.e., LLVM Intermediate Representation), thus avoiding any further optimizations by the compiler. Three different problem flavours are defined and solved with popular NSGA-II genetic algorithm. The promising results show the potential of the proposed technique.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Since December 2011, “LLVM” is officially no longer an acronym and simply a brand that applies to the LLVM umbrella project. For more information, see www.llvm.org.

  2. 2.

    Available in: github.com/jctor/Obfuscating-LLVM-Intermediate-Representation-Source-Code-with-NSGA-II—CISIS_2022.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Junta de Andalucía and ERDF under contract P18-2399 (GENIUS), the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and the ERDF (iSUN – RTI2018-100754-B-I00), and ERDF (OPTIMALE – FEDER-UCA18-108393). J.C. de la Torre acknowledges the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades for the support through FPU grant (FPU17/00563). B. Dorronsoro acknowledges “ayuda de recualificación” funding by Ministerio de Universidades and the European Union-Next GenerationEU. The experiments presented in this paper were carried out using the HPC facilities of the University of Luxembourg [28] hpc.uni.lu.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Superior School of Engineering, University of Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain

    Juan Carlos de la Torre, José Miguel Aragón-Jurado, Javier Jareño & Bernabé Dorronsoro

  2. Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Sébastien Varrette

  3. School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Bernabé Dorronsoro

Authors
  1. Juan Carlos de la Torre
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  2. José Miguel Aragón-Jurado
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  3. Javier Jareño
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  4. Sébastien Varrette
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  5. Bernabé Dorronsoro
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bernabé Dorronsoro .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain

    Pablo García Bringas

  2. University of León, León, Spain

    Hilde Pérez García

  3. University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain

    Francisco Javier Martínez de Pisón

  4. University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    José Ramón Villar Flecha

  5. Data Science and Big Data Lab, Pablo de Olavide University, Sevilla, Spain

    Alicia Troncoso Lora

  6. University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Enrique A. de la Cal

  7. Departamento de Ingeniería Informática, Escuela Politécnica Superior, University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain

    Álvaro Herrero

  8. Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain

    Francisco Martínez Álvarez

  9. University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Giuseppe Psaila

  10. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of A Coruña, Ferrol, Spain

    Héctor Quintián

  11. University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Emilio Corchado

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Torre, J.C.d.l., Aragón-Jurado, J.M., Jareño, J., Varrette, S., Dorronsoro, B. (2023). Obfuscating LLVM Intermediate Representation Source Code with NSGA-II. In: García Bringas, P., et al. International Joint Conference 15th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS 2022) 13th International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (ICEUTE 2022). CISIS ICEUTE 2022 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 532. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18409-3_18

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