The Lab
Elevating Software Protection
Against MATE-Attacks,
formally verified
CD-Lab AsTra is a research lab focused on improving the methodological foundations of software protection, particularly against Man-at-the-End attacks. The team of six researchers specializes on formally verifiable protection methods for binary code and integrating them seamlessly into existing high-security software development processes.
Research Areas
Compile-time Transformations
Starting with the protection primitives by Collberg et al., we create minimal protecting code transformations on code in SSA form by borrowing methodologies from optimizing compiler research.
Translation Validation
We transfer methods from compiler correctness research to the domain of software protection and perform translation validation on the protecting transformation passes; we further use binary lifting methodologies to conduct binary code validation.
Protection Strength Quantification
We develop and adapt information theoretic-based complexity metrics for software protection and use supervised Machine Learning approaches to analyse their potential to infer code- functionality and obfuscation methods; also, we derive tactics to increase the security of obfuscation strategies.
Protection Layering
We combine our security analysis of novel complexity metrics with results on resilience and stealth from our previous research to generate optimal combination strategies for transformation passes using algebraic group logic, multidimensional clustering methods, and expert validation approaches.
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