Abstract
Run-time packing is a technique employed by malware authors in order to conceal (e.g., encrypt) malicious code and recover it at run-time. In particular, some run-time packers only decrypt individual regions of code on demand, re-encrypting them again when they are not running. This technique is known as shifting decode frames and it can greatly complicate malware analysis. The first solution that comes to mind to analyze these samples is to apply multi-path exploration to trigger the unpacking of all the code regions. Unfortunately, multi-path exploration is known to have several limitations, such as its limited scalability for the analysis of real-world binaries. In this paper, we propose a set of domain-specific optimizations and heuristics to guide multi-path exploration and improve its efficiency and reliability for unpacking binaries protected with shifting decode frames.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and our shepherd Brendan Dolan-Gavitt for his assistance to improve the quality of this paper. This research was partially supported by the Basque Government under a pre-doctoral grant given to Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero.
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Ugarte-Pedrero, X., Balzarotti, D., Santos, I., Bringas, P.G. (2016). RAMBO: Run-Time Packer Analysis with Multiple Branch Observation. In: Caballero, J., Zurutuza, U., Rodríguez, R. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9721. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40667-1_10
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