SymSem: Symbolic Execution with Time Stamps for Deobfuscation

H Li, Y Zhan, W Jianqiang, D Gu - … 2019, Nanjing, China, December 6–8 …, 2020 - Springer
H Li, Y Zhan, W Jianqiang, D Gu
Information Security and Cryptology: 15th International Conference, Inscrypt …, 2020Springer
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 …
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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