Protecting Your Software Updates

Abstract

As described in many blog posts and the scientific literature, exploits for software vulnerabilities are often engineered on the basis of patches, which often involves the manual or automated identification of vulnerable code. The authors evaluate how this identification can be automated with the most frequently referenced diffing tools, demonstrating that for certain types of patches, these tools are indeed effective attacker tools. But they also demonstrate that by using binary code diversification, the effectiveness of the tools can be diminished severely, thus severely closing the attacker's window of opportunity.