English shellcode

History indicates that the security community commonly takes a divide-and-conquer approach to battling malware threats: identify the essential and inalienable components of an attack, then develop detection and prevention techniques that directly target one or more of the essential components. This abstraction is evident in much of the literature for buffer overflow attacks including, for instance, stack protection and NOP sled detection. It comes as no surprise then that we approach shellcode detection and prevention in a similar fashion. However, the common belief that components of polymorphic shellcode (e.g., the decoder) cannot reliably be hidden suggests a more implicit and broader assumption that continues to drive contemporary research: namely, that valid and complete representations of shellcode are fundamentally different in structure than benign payloads. While the first tenet of this assumption is philosophically undeniable (i.e., a string of bytes is either shellcode or it is not), truth of the latter claim is less obvious if there exist encoding techniques capable of producing shellcode with features nearly indistinguishable from non-executable content. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that shellcode must conform to superficial and discernible representations. Specifically, we demonstrate a technique for automatically producing English Shellcode, transforming arbitrary shellcode into a representation that is superficially similar to English prose. The shellcode is completely self-contained---i.e., it does not require an external loader and executes as valid IA32 code)---and can typically be generated in under an hour on commodity hardware. Our primary objective in this paper is to promote discussion and stimulate new ideas for thinking ahead about preventive measures for tackling evolutions in code-injection attacks.