Dynamically Obfuscating Virtual Execution Engine (DOVE)

The United States Army is increasingly dependent on weapons platforms that rely on commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware coupled with mission critical embedded software. Autonomous weapons platforms such as unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles and bomb/mine defusing robots are very effective at assisting the warfighter in countering asymmetric threats. This gives U.S. forces strategic and tactical advantages. Increased autonomy increases the risk of capture and subsequent reverse-engineering. The use of COTS hardware components makes the software much more susceptible to reverse-engineering than customized hardware. Reverse engineering a weapons platform enables an adversary to compromise the platform’s mission and cost soldiers’ lives. Anti-tamper (AT) and anti-reverse engineering (ARE) methods focus on sufficiently delaying or making it economically infeasible for the adversary; it is well understood that is impossible to entirely prevent re-engineering. The Dynamically Obfuscating Virtual Execution Environment (DOVE) will severely inhibit the adversary’s ability to reverse engineer or tamper with weapons software in a timely manner by applying dynamic obfuscation. The dynamic obfuscation in DOVE will undermine and invalidate the software cracker’s most basic assumptions about code execution and make it extremely difficult to reverse engineer or tamper with code.