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A chosen-plaintext attack on the microsoft BASIC protection

1986; Elsevier BV; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/0167-4048(86)90116-1

1872-6208

R. van den Assem, W.J. van Elk,

Advanced Malware Detection Techniques

The Microsoft BASIC (MBASIC) interpreter provides a command which protects the program currently in memory by saving it, on disk, in an encrypted format. A user can RUN such a protected program, but cannot access the source program. A chosen-plaintext attack was used to break the encoding; the encryption method could be derived easily from the enciphering of carefully chosen plaintext programs. As a result, a pair of MBASIC programs able to decrypt a protected program for any interpreter was developed. Further, it is shown that a secure system can never be realized, whichever encryption method is used.