Reflecting on the success of our first SURE and beginning the planning for the next year!
08.01.2026 19:51
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Reflecting on the success of our first SURE and beginning the planning for the next year!
Finally, stay in touch. We have an associated Discord (unorthodox, we know) to connect academics and practitioners: discord.gg/eVySXH7ZQ8
In fact, some of the attendees this year only made it due to the outreach on Discord. Come and chat!
Also, go read some of the papers:
sure-workshop.org/pa...
Keep, a lookout for our executive summary of papers/discussions/conclusions at SURE 2025 for those who could not attend IRL. We will post it in the coming days.
CCS has come to a close, and so has the first-ever SURE Workshop. We want to thank the authors, the PC, @moyix, our panel, and CCS for making SURE a success. We felt the support for this research area (the room was packed out for more than half the day).
See you all next year!
Check out the paper:
sure-workshop.org/ac...
In the special sub-area of type inferencing on binary code, Noriki's work explores the recovery of structs and how different GNN architectures may have better performance.
On our last presented work at SURE, we have Noriki Sakamoto presenting "Toward Inferring Structural Semantics from Binary Code Using Graph Neural Networks"
Check out the paper:
sure-workshop.org/ac...
Indeed, LibIHT is more robust. They achieve better results on binaries that attempt to evade their analysis.
The magic happens at the kernel level. Their new tool LibIHT (github.com/libiht/li...), is implemented both at the user-space and kernel-space level.
This is important for speed and robustness against evasion techniques.
Often, when static analysis tools do not work, you need to get down in the weeds of a program and start dynamically analyzing it.
In Thomason's work, he explores a way to be more robust and efficient by utilizing hardware features for dynamic analysis.
We're so back, and on our last session: Applications & Future Work.
Changyu "Thomason" Zhao is presenting "LibIHT: A Hardware-Based Approach to Efficient and Evasion-Resistant Dynamic Binary Analysis".
He is presenting virtually.
Find the paper here:
sure-workshop.org/ac...
Now, you got your crazy code, how do you select which functions in the code to obfuscate and evaluate on?
Functions must be "sensitive" and "central". Sensitive: has sensitive info like a uid or gid or a password. Central: many other functions should depend on it (calls).
Real world programs in their set need:
- unique functionality
- complex code
- ...
Some real programs: OpenSSL, QEMU, SQLite, curl, ... all difficult targets that are already hard to analyze, so they are not obfuscated.
An interesting observation: obfuscation is really expensive on the CPU. Real programs don't obfuscate the entire program; they only obfuscate critical code locations like license checks.
So they construct their dataset with that in mind.
Dongpeng argues that many modern works in deobfuscation don't work on large complex programs. Instead, they are mostly tested on toy programs that are not real-world.
To make a more useful evaluation, they explore how real obfuscation is used.
We're on our last talk of the session, remaining with the obfuscation topic. Dongpeng Xu is presenting "DEBRA: A Real-World Benchmark For Evaluating Deobfuscation Methods" in the place of Zheyun Feng.
Interesting question: do specific features seem to matter more for the models? Example: constants.
So far, the answer is unclear. These models are very black-box and require more explainability.
Takeaways:
- Training on obfuscation does help models, but it is not a silver bullet. This solution does not work well on obfuscation tech it has never seen before.
Check out the work:
sure-workshop.org/ac...
Some results: you train on obfuscation, and it turns out the model does do better (with BinShot) on obfuscated code. However, training it on specific types of obfuscation tech matters. For instance, training on control flow flattening may not help at all with MBA.
The reasoning task: binary code similarity detection. Do these two code snippets come from an identical source, and does obfuscation stop it?
They evaluate public obfuscation tools such as an LLVM obfuscator and the classic tool Tigress.
They have a few questions, one interesting one is:
Does training on obfuscated code actually make the models better at reasoning on them?
When reasoning on code, does it matter if it is obfuscated? The answer feels like a strong YES; however, how much does it matter for AI?
Jiyong's work explores this idea in a measurable way.
Next up is "On the Learnability, Robustness, and Adaptability of Deep Learning Models for Obfuscation-applied Code," presented by Jiyong Uhm of Sungkyunkwan University.
To run those tests, you can use LLMs! They get the input from decompilation and try to take the multiple-choice guess. It's important you measure probabilities along the way.
Check out the paper:
sure-workshop.org/ac...
Decoys are wrong answers on a test that could be reasonably guessed more closely. Instead of just having random answers, have highly guessed answers as decoys. See if things still work the same.
Something cool:
You get the following choices:
A: return *(x + 8)
B: return x._length
Both give you a similar probability of being chosen as `getLength` on a random test, which is unexpected. This is why you need stronger decoys!
Florian's work argues that we need to start integrated work in natural sciences, like multiple-choice tests that evaluate how good your data is at helping people on the test.
Let's start with variable/property naming inside of decompilation. Given many different choices for the same name, does one lead to an LLM or a human to make a decision that is more correct or predictable?