Publications

This paper introduces Delta Breakpad. It extends the Breakpad crash reporting system to handle software diversity effectively and efficiently by replicating and patching the debug information of diversified software versions. Simple adaptations to existing open source compiler tools are presented that on the one hand introduce significant amounts of diversification in the code and stack layout of ARMv7 binaries to mitigate the widespread ...

We discuss the potential benefits, requirements, and implementation challenges of a security-by-design approach in which an integrated development environment (IDE) plugin assists software developers to write code that complies with secure coding guidelines. We discuss how such a plugin can enable a company's policy-setting security experts and developers to pass their knowledge on to each other more efficiently, and to let developers more ...

Existing compiler techniques can transform code to make its timing behavior independent of sensitive values to prevent information leakage through time side channels. Those techniques are hampered, however, by their static nature and dependence on details of the processor targeted during the compilation. This paper presents a dynamic compiler approach based on offline profiles and JIT compiler strategies. This approach reduces overhead ...

Software protection aims at safeguarding assets embedded in software by preventing and delaying reverse engineering and tampering attacks. This paper presents an architecture and supporting tool flow to renew parts of native applications dynamically. Renewed and diversified code and data belonging to either the original application or to linked-in protections are delivered from a secure server to a client on demand. This results in frequent ...

Debuggers are a popular reverse engineering and tampering tool. Self-debugging is an effective technique for applications to defend themselves against hostile debuggers. In penetration tests on state-of-the-art self-debugging, we observed several opportunities through which it could be attacked, however. We therefore improved upon the existing technique, making it more resilient by introducing reciprocal debugging and making the transfers of ...

The software needs of scientists and engineers are growing and their programs are becoming more compute-heavy and problem-specific. This has led to an influx of non-expert programmers, who need to use and program high-performance computing platforms.With the continued stagnation of single-threaded performance, using hardware accelerators such as GPUs or FPGAs is necessary. Adapting software to these compute platforms is a difficult task, ...

When critical assets or functionalities are included in a piece of software accessible to the end users, code protections are used to hinder or delay the extraction or manipulation of such critical assets. The process and strategy followed by hackers to understand and tamper with protected software might differ from program understanding for benign purposes. Knowledge of the actual hacker behaviours while performing real attack tasks can inform ...

GPUs and other accelerators are popular devices for accelerating compute-intensive, parallelizable applications. However, programming these devices is a difficult task. Writing efficient device code is challenging, and is typically done in a low-level programming language. High-level languages are rarely supported, or do not integrate with the rest of the high-level language ecosystem. To overcome this, we propose compiler infrastructure to ...