slsa VS mkcert

Short answer: not where it counts.

My work focuses on recognizing known functions in obfuscated binaries, but there are some papers you might want to check out related to deobfuscation, if not necessarily using ML for deobfuscation or decompilation.

My take is that ML can soundly defeat the "easy" and more static obfuscation types (encodings, control flow flattening, splitting functions). It's low hanging fruit, and it's what I worked on most, but adoption is slow. On the other hand, "hard" obfuscations like virtualized functions or programs which embed JIT compilers to obfuscate at runtime... as far as I know, those are still unsolved problems.

This is a good overview of the subject, but pretty old and doesn't cover "hard" obfuscations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1566145.

https://www.jinyier.me/papers/DATE19_Obf.pdf uses deobfuscation for RTL logic (FGPA/ASIC domain) with SAT solvers. Might be useful for a point of view from a fairly different domain.

https://advising.cs.arizona.edu/~debray/Publications/generic... uses "semantics-preserving transformations" to shed obfuscation. I think this approach is the way to go, especially when combined with dynamic/symbolic analysis to mitigate virt/jit types of transformations.

I'll mention this one as a cautionary tale: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2886012 has some good general info but glosses over the machine learning approach. It considers Hex-rays' FLIRT to be "machine learning", but FLIRT just hashes signatures, can be spoofed (i.e. https://siliconpr0n.org/uv/issues_with_flirt_aware_malware.p...), and is useless against obfuscation.

Eventually I think SBOM tools like Black Duck[1] and SLSA[2] will incorporate ML to improve the accuracy of even figuring out what dependencies a piece of software actually has.

[1]: https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/software-composi...

[2]: https://slsa.dev/

The dependency chain is certified! SLSA!

The things you mentioned are not solved by a typical "SBOM" but e.g. CycloneDX has extra fields to record provenance and pedigree and things like in-toto (https://in-toto.io/) or SLSA (https://slsa.dev/) also aim to work in this field.

I've spent the last six months in this field and people will tell you that this or that is an industry best practice or "a standard" but in my experience none of that is true. Everyone is still trying to figure out how best to protect the software supply chain security and things are still very much in flux.

It's multi-pronged and I imagine adopters may use a subset of features. Broadly, I think folks are going to be interested in a) branch/tag/reference protection rules, b) file protection rules (monorepo or otherwise, though monorepos do pose a very apt usecase for gittuf), and c) general key management for those who primarily care about Git signing.

For those who care about a and b, I think the work we want to do to support [in-toto attestations](https://github.com/in-toto/attestation) for [SLSA's upcoming source track](https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa/issues/956) could be very interesting as well.

It doesn't have to be. Corporations which are FedRAMP[1] compliant, have to build software reproducibly in a fully isolated environment, only from reviewed code.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedRAMP

[2] https://slsa.dev/

SLSA stands for Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts, and it is a framework that aims to provide a set of best practices for the software supply chain, with a focus on OSS. It was created by Google, and it is now part of the OpenSSF. It consists of four levels of assurance, from Level 1 to Level 4, that correspond to different degrees of protection against supply chain attacks. Our CTO Paolo Mainardi mentioned SLSA in a very good article on software supply chain security, and we also mentioned it in another article about securing OCI Artifacts on Kubernetes.

SLSA.dev

The experimental HTTPS flag relies on mkcert, designed for a single development system. If you run a Docker container, the flag won’t configure your local browser to trust its certificate.

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert