2025/08/02 by Jiahui Shang, Shang, Jiahui, Zhang, Luning +2
Computer Science · #Security and Verification in Computing #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Digital and Cyber Forensics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.01144
While traditional cryptographic research focuses on algorithm-level provable security, many real-world attacks exploit weaknesses in system implementations, such as memory mismanagement, poor entropy sources, and insecure key lifecycles. Existing approaches address these risks in isolation but lack a unified, verifiable framework for modeling implementation-layer security. In this work, we propose Implementation-Level Provable Security, a new paradigm that defines security in terms of structurally verifiable resilience against real-world attack surfaces during deployment. To demonstrate its feasibility, we present SEER (Secure and Efficient Encryption-based Erasure via Ransomware), a file destruction system that repurposes and reinforces the encryption core of Babuk ransomware. SEER incorporates key erasure, entropy validation, and execution consistency checks to ensure a well-constrained, auditable attack surface. Our evaluation shows that SEER achieves strong irrecoverability guarantees while maintaining practical performance. This work demonstrates a shift from abstract theoretical models toward practically verifiable implementation-layer security.