Reuse-oriented camouflaging trojan: Vulnerability detection and attack construction

TLDR: This paper presents a framework to determine if a given binary program is vulnerable to this attack and to construct a concrete trojan if so, and demonstrates that the reuse-oriented camouflaging trojans are a real threat and vulnerabilities of this type in legal binaries can be effectively revealed and confirmed.

Abstract: We introduce the reuse-oriented camouflaging trojan — a new threat to legitimate software binaries. To perform a malicious action, such a trojan identifies and reuses an existing function in a legal binary program instead of implementing the function itself. Furthermore, this trojan is stealthy in that the malicious invocation of a targeted function usually takes place in a location where it is legal to do so, closely mimicking a legal invocation. At the network level, the victim binary can still follow its communication protocol without exhibiting any anomalous behavior. Meanwhile, many close-source shareware binaries are rich in functions that can be maliciously “reused”, making them attractive targets of this type of attack. In this paper, we present a framework to determine if a given binary program is vulnerable to this attack and to construct a concrete trojan if so. Our experiments with a number of real-world software binaries demonstrate that the reuse-oriented camouflaging trojans are a real threat and vulnerabilities of this type in legal binaries can be effectively revealed and confirmed.