We have fully funded open positions for 3 years PhD students and 3 years Postdocs on program synthesis for binary-level program deobfuscation.
TITLE - Automatically simplify highly obfuscated code through black- and white-box reasonning.
TOPIC - Software contains valuable assets that attackers may try to retrieve. Code obfuscation aims at protecting codes against such attackers by translating a sensitive program into an equivalent but harder to reverse engineer one. In a cyber security context, a cat and mouse game arises between obfuscation and deobfuscation (methods to simplify obfuscated code). Finding new deobfuscation approaches is thus crucial to better adapt the security of considered protections. This work aims to devise new efficient deobfuscation approaches based on program synthesis (e.g., SyGus, CEGIS) and formal methods. The selected candidate will build such methods on top of our recent results on black-box synthesis-based deobfuscation published at ACM CCS 2021. He will be able to rely on both our team’s expertise on binary-level analysis, as well as the tools BINSEC and XYNTIA to carry out this task.
KEYWORDS - deobfuscation, program synthesis, formal methods, binary-level program analysis, reverse engineering
SUPERVISION - Grégoire Menguy and Sébastien Bardin.
HOSTING - You will be hosted at the CEA in Saclay.
To apply, please check out the detailed application procedure and job info.
When to apply - As soon as possible :-) We process the applications when they arrive, so don’t be too late