Raising the Bar against Automated Attacks using x86 Machine Code Diversity Transformations

Context Software diversity, self-modification, and obfuscation have many applications in software security and attack resilience. For example, software diversity schemes creating individualized binaries can, by scrambling memory and code layout, make unified exploits which are successful against all installations of one software product, much harder or even infeasible. Self-modification can help against runtime analysis, attacks, and binary patching which would, e.g., remove key, authorization, or integrity checks. Self-modification might also be used to other ends, e.g., to build cryptography on top of it. Obfuscation is commonly applied to protect programs against analysis and reverse engineering. While the aforementioned concepts may not offer perfect security, they can raise the bar for attackers such that reliable attacks become too expensive to pay off. Software diversity might even prevent reliable exploits against all software installations altogether. Goal The main objective of this thesis is to develop a general and extensible framework to allo