Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Participation In International Programs

Imhotep (Egypt)

• Program: PHC

• Title: Code obfuscation through JIT compilation

• Inria principal investigator: Erven ROHOU

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Egypt-Japan University for Science and Technology (Egypt)

• Duration: Jan 2013 - Dec 2013

• This project leverages JIT compilation to make software tamper-proof. The idea is to constantly generate different versions of an application, even while it runs, to make reverse engineering much more complex. A strong random number generator guarantees that generated code is not reproducible – though the semantics is the same. In the course of the project, we also studied new forms of On-Stack-Replacement that let us recompile code even from the middle of a function. Finally, we studied how threads can be exploited to generate new forms of obfuscation, leveraging the fact that parallelism is error-prone, and difficult to debug and reverse-engineer.

Informal International Partners

The ALF team has informal collaborations with several international teams: Carnegie Mellon (Pr Mutlu), Georgia Tech (Pr Qureshi), University of Wisconsin (Pr Wood), University of Cyprus (Pr Sazeides), University of Ghent (Dr Eyerman), XLNS Research (Dr Arnold), UFMG Brazil (Pr Pereira), Barcelona Supercomputing center (Pr Cazorla and Pr Abella),