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A Survey on Aims and Environments of Diversification and Obfuscation in Software Security

Shohreh Hosseinzadeh, Sampsa Rauti, Samuel Laurén, Jari-Matti Mäkelä, Johannes Holvitie, Sami Hyrynsalmi, Ville Leppänen, A Survey on Aims and Environments of Diversification and Obfuscation in Software Security. In: Boris Rachev, Angel Smrikarov (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies CompSysTech'16, 113–120, ACM Press, 2016.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2983468.2983479

Abstract:

Diversification and obfuscation methods are promising approaches used to secure software and prevent malware from functioning. Diversification makes each software instance unique so that malware attacks cannot rely on the knowledge of the program's execution environment and/or internal structure anymore. We present a systematic literature review on the state of-the-art of diversification and obfuscation research aiming to improve software security between 1993 and 2014. As the result of systematic search, in the final phase, 209 related papers were included in this study. In this study we focus on two specific research questions: what are the aims of diversification and obfuscation techniques and what are the environments they are applied to. The former question includes the languages and the execution environments that can benefit from these two techniques, while the second question presents the goals of the techniques and also the type of attacks they mitigate.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpHoRaLaMxHoHyLe16a,
  title = {A Survey on Aims and Environments of Diversification and Obfuscation in Software Security},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies CompSysTech'16},
  author = {Hosseinzadeh, Shohreh and Rauti, Sampsa and Laurén, Samuel and Mäkelä, Jari-Matti and Holvitie, Johannes and Hyrynsalmi, Sami and Leppänen, Ville},
  editor = {Rachev, Boris and Smrikarov, Angel},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  pages = {113–120},
  year = {2016},
  keywords = {Software security, diversification, obfuscation, systematic literature review (SLR)},
  ISSN = {978-1-4503-4182-0},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Software Development Laboratory (SwDev)

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