A Vision for Enhancing Security of Cryptography in Executables

This paper proposes an idea on how to use existing techniques from late stage software customization to improve the security of software employing cryptographic functions. In our vision, we can verify an implemented algorithm and replace it with a faster or more trusted implementation if necessary. We also want to be able to add encryption to binaries that currently do not employ any, or gain access to unencrypted data if an application depends on encryption. To corroborate the feasibility of our vision, we developed a prototype that is able to identify cryptographic functions in highly optimized binary code and tests the identified functions for functional correctness, potentially also revealing backdoors.