Attack Resistant Defense Mechanisms Website

Overview of Research

Attack resistance is a formal framework to evaluate defense mechanisms like ASLR and cryptographic obfuscation. It ensures that a protected program ((P + D)) is computationally indistinguishable from an ideal program ((IP)), even if both have the same bug. This means attackers cannot exploit vulnerabilities in (P + D) due to the defense mechanism (D). The framework reduces the attacker’s probability of success to negligible levels, leveraging security parameters like random seeds. Variants also address practical, weaker attackers, such as SAT-based models.

Publications:

  1. Martin Ochoa, Sebastian Banescu, Cynthia Disenfeld, Gilles Barthe, and Vijay Ganesh
    Reasoning about Probabilistic Defense Mechanisms against Remote Attacks
    The Second IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE EuroS&P 2017), Paris, France, April 28, 2017.
    [pdf][bib]

  2. Vijay Ganesh, Sebastian Banescu, and Martin Ochoa
    The Meaning of Attack-Resistant Programs
    International Workshop on Programming Languages and Security (PLAS at ECOOP 2015), Prague, Czech Republic, July 6, 2015. Presentation-only at International Workshop on Foundations of Computer Security (FCS at CSF 2015), Verona, Italy, July 13, 2015.
    [pdf][bib]

  3. Vijay Ganesh, Michael Carbin, and Martin Rinard
    Cryptographic Path Hardening: Hiding Vulnerabilities in Software through Cryptography
    Off-the-Beaten-Path Workshop @ POPL 2012, Philadelphia, PA, USA, January 22, 2012.
    [pdf][bib]