Rewrite to Reinforce: Rewriting the Binary to Apply Countermeasures against Fault Injection

TL;DR

This paper presents two binary rewriting techniques to insert countermeasures against fault injection attacks, enabling security enhancements without source code access.

Contribution

It introduces novel binary rewriting methods, including reassembly and high-level IR translation, for applying security countermeasures post-compilation.

Findings

Reassembly-based countermeasure injection demonstrated effectiveness.

High-level IR translation enables flexible security modifications.

Both methods facilitate last-minute security enhancements without source code.

Abstract

Fault injection attacks can cause errors in software for malicious purposes. Oftentimes, vulnerable points of a program are detected after its development. It is therefore critical for the user of the program to be able to apply last-minute security assurance to the executable file without having access to the source code. In this work, we explore two methodologies based on binary rewriting that aid in injecting countermeasures in the binary file. The first approach injects countermeasures by reassembling the disassembly whereas the second approach leverages a full translation to a high-level IR and lowering that back to the target architecture.