No abstract

A great deal of software is distributed in the form of executable code. The ability to reverse engineer such executables can create opportunities for theft of intellectual property via software piracy, as well as security breaches by allowing attackers to discover vulnerabilities in an application. The process of reverse engineering an executable program typically begins with disassembly, which translates machine code to assembly code. This is then followed by various decompilation steps that aim to recover higher-level abstractions from the assembly code. Most of the work to date on code obfuscation has focused on disrupting or confusing the decompilation phase. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the initial disassembly phase. Our goal is to disrupt the static disassembly process so as to make programs harder to disassemble correctly. We describe two widely used static disassembly algorithms, and discuss techniques to thwart each of them. Experimental results indicate that significant portions of executables that have been obfuscated using our techniques are disassembled incorrectly, thereby showing the efficacy of our methods.

Software watermarking is a tool used to combat software piracy by embedding identifying information into a program. Most existing proposals for software watermarking have the shortcoming that the mark can be destroyed via fairly straightforward semantics-preserving code transformations. This paper introduces path-based watermarking, a new approach to software watermarking based on the dynamic branching behavior of programs. The advantage of this technique is that error-correcting and tamper-proofing techniques can be used to make path-based watermarks resilient against a wide variety of attacks. Experimental results, using both Java bytecode and IA-32 native code, indicate that even relatively large watermarks can be embedded into programs at modest cost.