Down to the bare metal

A detailed understanding of the behavior of exploits and malicious software is necessary to obtain a comprehensive overview of vulnerabilities in operating systems or client applications, and to develop protection techniques and tools. To this end, a lot of research has been done in the last few years on binary analysis techniques to efficiently and precisely analyze code. Most of the common analysis frameworks are based on software emulators since such tools offer a fine-grained control over the execution of a given program. Naturally, this leads to an arms race where the attackers are constantly searching for new methods to detect such analysis frameworks in order to successfully evade analysis.