ROOTS 2021 – Call for Papers

René Pfeiffer/ May 10, 2021/ Conference

The Reversing and Offensive-oriented Trends Symposium, an academic workshop, is again co-located with the DeepSec conference in its fifth year. ROOTS solicits contributions that focus on theorems and root shells: In security, two things you absolutely cannot argue with. Security is hard to define. Most often, security is defined by its absence. For scientists, this is particularly unsatisfactory. A lack of definition increases the difficulty to find suitable quantitive and qualitative models. Even though the overall landscape is blurry at best; exploitation, reverse engineering, and offensive techniques have their place. ROOTS aims to explore this territory. The first European symposium of its kind, ROOTS aims to provide an industry-friendly academic platform to discuss trends in exploitation, reversing, offensive techniques, and effective protections. Submissions should provide novel attack forms, describe novel reversing techniques, or effective

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DeepSec, ROOTS and DeepINTEL Update – Call for Papers open

René Pfeiffer/ April 19, 2021/ Administrivia, Call for Papers, Conference, DeepIntel

Planning events is still challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic celebrated its first birthday. Despite efforts not to have the second birthday of the pandemic, the ever changing regulations and statues updates regarding the infections make preparations for conferences very hard. We know you want to plan as well, therefore we have an update for you. DeepSec, ROOTS, and DeepINTEL will happen on-site here in Vienna. We closely coordinate with our conference hotel. Their staff is eager to reopen. Everything depends on the rate of vaccination and the regulations issued by the European and Austrian authorities. There is not much we can influence. Given our health protection measure we worked out last year, we are well prepared to handle everything short of a total lockdown. We don’t do any forecasts at the moment. The next months

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Administrivia: DeepSec/DeepINTEL/ROOTS Speaker Benefits extended to 2021

René Pfeiffer/ July 8, 2020/ Call for Papers, Conference

The Call for Papers of DeepSec, DeepINTEL, and ROOTS have a deadline. DeepSec and DeepINTEL have set he first deadline to 31 July 2020. We will accept submissions after this date, but everyone who submitted before the deadline will be reviewed first. Since all speakers are entitled to benefits which depend on their presence at the conference we decided to extend these offers. If you submit your presentation for the 2020 events and cannot attend, then all benefits such as entry to the conference, travel cost reimbursement, our famous speaker’s dinner, your stay at the hotel, and everything else will stay valid until DeepSec 2021. The only condition is that your content must be presented (either virtually or by proxy). The offer is valid for DeepSec and ROOTS. DeepINTEL is a special case, because

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ROOTS 2019 Talk: Shallow Security: on the Creation of Adversarial Variants to Evade ML-Based Malware Detectors – Fabricio Ceschin

Sanna/ November 22, 2019/ ROOTS

The use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques for malware detection has been a trend in the last two decades. More recently, researchers started to investigate adversarial approaches to bypass these ML-based malware detectors. Adversarial attacks became so popular that a large Internet company (ENDGAME Inc.) has launched a public challenge to encourage researchers to bypass their (three) ML-based static malware detectors. Our research group teamed to participate in this challenge in August/2019 and accomplishing the bypass of all 150 tests proposed by the company. To do so, we implemented an automatic exploitation method which moves the original malware binary sections to resources and includes new chunks of data to it to create adversarial samples that not only bypassed their ML detectors, but also real AV engines as well (with a lower detection rate than

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ROOTS 2019 Talk: RevEngE is a dish served cold: Debug-Oriented Malware Decompilation and Reassembly – Marcus Botacin

Sanna/ November 21, 2019/ ROOTS

Malware analysis is a key process for knowledge gain on infections and cyber security overall improvement. Analysis tools have been evolving from complete static analyzers to partial code decompilers. Malware decompilation allows for code inspection at higher abstraction levels, facilitating incident response procedures. However, the decompilation procedure has many challenges, such as opaque constructions, irreversible mappings, semantic gap bridging, among others. In this talk, we propose a new approach that leverages the human analyst expertise to overcome decompilation challenges. We name this approach “DoD—debug-oriented decompilation”, in which the analyst is able to reverse engineer the malware sample on his own and to instruct the decompiler to translate selected code portions (e.g., decision branches, fingerprinting functions, payloads etc.) into high level code. With DoD, the analyst might group all decompiled pieces into new code to

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ROOTS 2019 Talk: Automatic Modulation Parameter Detection In Practice – Johannes Pohl

Sanna/ November 19, 2019/ ROOTS

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have to be small and energy efficient so that resources for security mechanisms tend to be limited. Due to the lack of open source or license free standards, device manufacturers often use proprietary protocols. Software Defined Radios (SDR) provide a generic way to investigate wireless protocols because they operate on nearly arbitrary frequencies, but they output sine waves that have to be demodulated. This demodulation process slows down security investigations because it forces researchers to start on the physical layer while the real reverse-engineering is performed on the logical layer. We contribute an auto-detection system that estimates all demodulation parameters of a wireless signal and, additionally, explicitly returns all these parameters so that they can be fine-tuned afterwards. This allows security researchers to skip the physical layer and work

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ROOTS 2019 Talk: Harzer Roller: Linker-Based Instrumentation for Enhanced Embedded Security Testing – Katharina Bogad

Sanna/ November 14, 2019/ ROOTS

Due to the rise of the Internet of Things, there are many new chips and platforms available for hobbyists and industry alike to build smart devices. The software development kits (SDKs) for these new platforms usually include closed-source binaries comprising wireless protocol implementations, cryptographic implementations, or other library functions, which are shared among all user code across the platform. Leveraging such a library vulnerability has a high impact on a given platform. However, as these platforms are often shipped ready-to-use, classic debug infrastructure like JTAG is often times not available. In this paper, we present a method, called Harzer Roller, to enhance embedded firmware security testing on resource-constrained devices. With the Harzer Roller, we hook instrumentation code into function call and return. The hooking not only applies to the user application code but to

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ROOTS 2019 Invited Talk: Please, Bias Me! – Pauline Bourmeau

Sanna/ October 1, 2019/ Conference, ROOTS

Anyone doing research, audits, code reviews, or development will most probably use her or his brain. Have you ever considered what can influence your decisions and thinking processes? We asked Pauline Bourmeau to explain and to share her thoughts on this matter. Cognitive bias influences our decisions and affects many part of our daily life. We will explore how it affects our security responses, and how we can identify it and be more effective. From Red-team to Forensic experts to incident responders, we see what we expect to encounter in our field, based on our range of past experiences. Adversary tactics make gold out of these loopholes in our predictable thinking. This talk aims to invite the audience to step back from our daily routine and challenges us to understand what cognitive bias is.

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Translated Press Release: IT Security is increasingly dominated by Geopolitics

Sanna/ February 18, 2019/ Call for Papers, Conference, DeepIntel, ROOTS

DeepSec and DeepINTEL conference open call for papers – submission for lectures and trainings are in demand.Anyone who reads the technology part of their favourite magazine can hardly escape the promises of future network technologies. Your own car becomes a smartphone. The talking fridge becomes a therapist. 5G mobile networks promise high-speed fibre optic streaming of data on the speed-limited electric scooter. The second reading reveals the meaning of the letter G in 5G – it stands for geopolitics. As part of the network expansion, there are discussions about hidden killswitches for emergency shutdowns, entire networks and backdoors to eavesdrop on customers. In November, the DeepSec In-Depth Security Conference addresses the technical challenges of the Internet of Things, emerging network technologies, and geopolitical constraints dictated by key events of the last 6 years. 5G

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ROOTS 2018: Library and Function Identification by Optimized Pattern Matching on Compressed Databases – Maximilian von Tschirschnitz

Sanna/ January 7, 2019/ ROOTS

[Editor’s note: This article belongs to the Reversing and Offensive-oriented Trends Symposium 2018 (ROOTS). It was misplaced, so we publish it today. Maximilian’s talk was recorded and can be watched on Vimeo.] The goal of library and function identification is to find the original library and function to a given machine-code snippet. These snippets commonly arise from penetration tests attacking a remote executable, static malware analysis or from an IP infringement investigation. While there are several tools designed to achieve this task, all of these seem to rely on varied methods of signature-based identification. In this work, the author argues that this approach is not sufficient for many cases and propose a design and implementation for a multitool called KISS. KISS uses lossless compression and highly optimized pattern matching algorithms to create a very

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ROOTS 2018 Talk: Kernel-Assisted Debugging of Linux Applications – Tobias Holl, Philipp Klocke, Fabian Franzen

Sanna/ November 22, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

On Linux, most—if not all—debuggers use the ptrace debugging API to control their target processes. However, ptrace proves unsatisfactory for many malware analysis and reverse engineering tasks: So-called split-personality malware often adapts its behavior in the presence of a debugger, yet ptrace makes no attempt to hide from a target process. Furthermore, ptrace enforces a strict one-to-many relation meaning that while each tracer can trace many tracees, each tracee can only be controlled by at most one tracer. Simultaneously, the complex API and signal-based communications provide opportunities for erroneous usage. Previous works have identified the newer uprobes tracing API as a candidate for building a replacement for ptrace, but ultimately rejected it due to lack of practical use and documentation. Building upon uprobes, we introduce plutonium-dbg, a Linux kernel module providing debugging facilities independent

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ROOTS 2018 Talk: The Swift Language from a Reverse Engineering Perspective – Malte Kraus & Vincent Haupert

Sanna/ November 13, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Over the last decade, mobile devices have taken over the consumer market for computer hardware. Almost all these mobile devices run either Android or iOS as their operating systems. In 2014, Apple introduced the Swift programming language as an alternative to Objective C for writing iOS and macOS applications. The rising adoption of this new language has to some extent obsoleted existing techniques for program analysis for these platforms, like method swizzling and “class-dump”. In this paper we discuss features of Swift binaries that help in reverse engineering the functionality of the contained code: We document the memory layout of compound data types and the calling convention used by the Swift compiler, as well as the runtime type information that is used by runtime and debugger when data types are not known statically. This

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ROOTS 2018: How Android’s UI Security is Undermined by Accessibility – Anatoli Kalysch

Sanna/ November 9, 2018/ Conference, ROOTS

Android’s accessibility API was designed to assist users with disabilities, or temporarily preoccupied users unable to interact with a device, e.g., while driving a car. Nowadays, many Android apps rely on the accessibility API for other purposes, including apps like password managers but also malware. From a security perspective, the accessibility API is precarious as it undermines an otherwise strong principle of sandboxing in Android that separates apps. By means of an accessibility service, apps can interact with the UI elements of another app, including reading from its screen and writing to its text fields. As a consequence, design shortcomings in the accessibility API and other UI features such as overlays have grave security implications. This talk will provide a critical perspective on the current state of Android accessibility and selected UI security features.

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ROOTS 2018 Call for Papers – Deadline extended

René Pfeiffer/ August 27, 2018/ Administrivia, Call for Papers

ROOTS‘ deadline for abstract submissions has been extended. The new deadline is the 17 September 2018. Authors will be notified by 30 September 2018. We need your camera-ready papers until 13 October 2018. Please spread the word. The Reversing and Offensive-Oriented Trends Symposium 2018 still accepts your research. We are looking forward to the results of your work. Information security is all about well-researched facts and reproducible findings. If you need some more time to prepare your submission, this is the time. Let us know if you need help when submitting. The first European symposium of its kind, ROOTS aims to provide an industry-friendly academic platform to discuss trends in exploitation, reversing, offensive techniques, and effective protections. Submissions should provide novel attack forms, describe novel reversing techniques, or effective deployable defences. Submissions can also

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ROOTS and DeepSec 2018 Call for Papers – Reminder and Bugfix

René Pfeiffer/ July 17, 2018/ Call for Papers

The ROOTS and DeepSec Calls for Papers are still running! We did some bugfixing on the web page, so the deadline for any ROOTS submissions is now 26 August 2018. Please spread the word and submit your research. If you need any assistance feel free to contact us. The DeepSec Call for Papers closes on 31 July 2018. Now is the time for your submission. We are looking forward to see your presentation on stage at DeepSec 2018!