FOSSIL: A Resilient and Efficient System for Identifying FOSS Functions in Malware Binaries

摘要

Identifying free open-source software (FOSS) packages on binaries when the source code is unavailable is important for many security applications, such as malware detection, software infringement, and digital forensics. This capability enhances both the accuracy and the efficiency of reverse engineering tasks by avoiding false correlations between irrelevant code bases. Although the FOSS package identification problem belongs to the field of software engineering, conventional approaches rely strongly on practical methods in data mining and database searching. However, various challenges in the use of these methods prevent existing function identification approaches from being effective in the absence of source code. To make matters worse, the introduction of obfuscation techniques, the use of different compilers and compilation settings, and software refactoring techniques has made the automated detection of FOSS packages increasingly difficult. With very few exceptions, the existing systems are not resilient to such techniques, and the exceptions are not sufficiently efficient.