dead_code_elimination

Deadcode Elimination

While not an experiment in our evaluation, we have shown in Table 1 of our paper that deadcode elimination (or more general compiler optimizations) are a powerful tool, however, fall short w.r.t. to our design, Loki.

To conduct this experiment, use experiment_dce.py (which builds 10 binaries and samples 1000 handlers) or follow the subsequent steps:

1. Build Binaries

First, we need to build binaries with the following Rust component config:

# Settings:
    rewrite_mba: true,
    superoptimization: true,
    schedule_non_deterministic: true,

To do so, run the following:

cd ../../loki/
mkdir -p /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/
python3 obfuscate.py /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/binaries --instances 10 --verification-rounds 10 --allow aes_encrypt des_encrypt md5 rc4 sha1
cd -

Note that we build only 10 instances and use only 10 verification rounds (other than in our paper).

Expected time (104 CPU cores): ~15 minutes

2. Extract handler addresses

First, extract all handler and their addresses - to do so, switch to the ../../lokiattack folder and run:

cd ../../lokiattack/
python3 extract_handler_addresses.py /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/binaries -o /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/dce_handler_addresses.txt --num-samples 1000

Note that we sample only 1000 handler to speedup evaluation (other than in our paper). Do not set --num-samples if you want to test all handlers.

Expected time (104 CPU cores): ~1 second

3. Run dead code eliminiation

Then, run the dead code elimination (again in the lokiattack directory):

python3 run.py compiler_optimizations /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/binaries static -o /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/dce_results.txt --handler-list /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/dce_handler_addresses.txt
cd -

Expected time (104 CPU cores): ~30 seconds

4. Evaluate results

Finally, evaluate the results using eval_dead_code_elimination.py and eval_executed_handler.py in this directory:

python3 eval_dead_code_elimination.py /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/dce_results.txt
python3 eval_executed_handler.py /home/user/evaluation/experiment_01_02_03_dce/binaries

Expected time (104 CPU cores): ~1 second

Compare the results against the ones reported in Table 1 (page 3), last column.