arXiv subjects

Daniele Canavese

Publications and source records attributed to Daniele Canavese.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Empirical Assessment of the Code Comprehension Effort Needed to Attack Programs Protected with Obfuscation

Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more challenging to understand and reverse-engineer, while maintaining its original functionality. Although obfuscation is widely adopted, its effectiveness remains largely unexplored and unthoroughly evaluated. This paper presents a controlled experiment involving Master's students performing code comprehension tasks on applications hardened with obfuscation. The experiment's goals are to assess the effectiveness of obfuscation in delaying code comprehension by attackers and to determine whether complexity metrics can accurately predict the impact of these protections on success rates and durations of code comprehension tasks. The study is the first to evaluate the effect of layering multiple obfuscation techniques on a single piece of protected code. It also provides experimental evidence of the correlation between objective metrics of the attacked code and the likelihood of a successful attack, bridging the gap between objective and subjective approaches to estimating potency. Finally, the paper highlights significant aspects that warrant additional analysis and opens new avenues for further experiments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Automatic Selection of Protections to Mitigate Risks Against Software Applications

This paper introduces a novel approach for the automated selection of software protections to mitigate MATE risks against critical assets within software applications. We formalize the key elements involved in protection decision-making - including code artifacts, assets, security requirements, attacks, and software protections - and frame the protection process through a game-theoretic model. In this model, a defender strategically applies protections to various code artifacts of a target application, anticipating repeated attack attempts by adversaries against the confidentiality and integrity of the application's assets. The selection of the optimal defense maximizes resistance to attacks while ensuring the application remains usable by constraining the overhead introduced by protections. The game is solved through a heuristic based on a mini-max depth-first exploration strategy, augmented with dynamic programming optimizations for improved efficiency. Central to our formulation is the introduction of the Software Protection Index, an original contribution that extends existing notions of potency and resilience by evaluating protection effectiveness against attack paths using software metrics and expert assessments. We validate our approach through a proof-of-concept implementation and expert evaluations, demonstrating that automated software protection is a practical and effective solution for risk mitigation in software.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Design, Implementation, and Automation of a Risk Management Approach for Man-at-the-End Software Protection

The last years have seen an increase in Man-at-the-End (MATE) attacks against software applications, both in number and severity. However, software protection, which aims at mitigating MATE attacks, is dominated by fuzzy concepts and security-through-obscurity. This paper presents a rationale for adopting and standardizing the protection of software as a risk management process according to the NIST SP800-39 approach. We examine the relevant constructs, models, and methods needed for formalizing and automating the activities in this process in the context of MATE software protection. We highlight the open issues that the research community still has to address. We discuss the benefits that such an approach can bring to all stakeholders. In addition, we present a Proof of Concept (PoC) decision support system that instantiates many of the discussed construct, models, and methods and automates many activities in the risk analysis methodology for the protection of software. Despite being a prototype, the PoC's validation with industry experts indicated that several aspects of the proposed risk management process can already be formalized and automated with our existing toolbox and that it can actually assist decision-making in industrially relevant settings.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Man-at-the-End Software Protection as a Risk Analysis Process

The last years have seen an increase of Man-at-the-End (MATE) attacks against software applications, both in number and severity. However, MATE software protections are dominated by fuzzy concepts and techniques, with security-through-obscurity omnipresent in the field. This paper presents a rationale for adopting and standardizing the protection of software as a risk management process according to the NIST SP800-39 approach. We examine the relevant aspects of formalizing and automating the activities in this process in the context of MATE software protection. We highlight the open issues that the research community still has to address. We discuss the benefits that such an approach can bring to all stakeholders. In addition, we present a Proof of Concept (PoC) of a decision support system that automates many activities in the risk analysis methodology towards the protection of software applications. Despite still being a prototype, the PoC validation with industry experts indicated that several aspects of the proposed risk management process can already be formalized and automated with our existing toolbox, and that it can actually assist decision making in industrially relevant settings

cs.SE↗

arXiv2017

Classification and Analysis of Communication Protection Policy Anomalies

This paper presents a classification of the anomalies that can appear when designing or implementing communication protection policies. Together with the already known intra- and inter-policy anomaly types, we introduce a novel category, the inter-technology anomalies, related to security controls implementing different technologies, both within the same network node and among different network nodes. Through an empirical assessment, we prove the practical significance of detecting this new anomaly class. Furthermore, this paper introduces a formal model, based on first-order logic rules that analyses the network topology and the security controls at each node to identify the detected anomalies and suggest the strategies to resolve them. This formal model has manageable computational complexity and its implementation has shown excellent performance and good scalability.

cs.CR↗