A Survey of Control-Flow Obfuscations

Majumdar, Anirban; Thomborson, Clark; Drape, Stephen

doi:10.1007/11961635_26

Cited by 25 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Control flow graph obfuscation is also a widely studied technique ( [26], [4], [17]). In this article, we are interested in the protection of the binary executable, and we refer to it as the machine code, simply the code, or the assembly.…”

Section: State-of-the-artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hardware-enforced Protection against Software Reverse-Engineering based on an Instruction Set Encoding

Danger

Guilley

Praden

2014

Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop 2014

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Software programs are prone to reverse-engineering. Protection usually consists either in obfuscation or Randomized Instruction Set Emulation (RISE). In this article, we explore a mixed software/hardware RISE suitable for embedded systems. This solution is very easy to implement on any open CPU core (LEON, openRISC, LatticeMicro32, etc.), as it implies only localized changes at the latest stage of the code execution hardware, which makes Dallas and DMA attacks unsuccessful. Similarly, alternations in the software development flow are minor and straightforward. All in one, our study shows that an easy protection can be attained at virtually no overhead cost if both the hardware and the software are customized.

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Section: State-of-the-artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hardware-enforced Protection against Software Reverse-Engineering based on an Instruction Set Encoding

Danger

Guilley

Praden

2014

Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop 2014

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“…Some prevent automatic decompilation [2], [3]. Some obfuscate data flow [4], [5] or control flow [3], [4], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. Others simply omit humanreadable, meaningful identifiers [2], [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pushing Java Type Obfuscation to the Limit

Foket

Sutter

Bosschere

2014

IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput.

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Abstract-Bytecoded .Net and Java programs reveal type information through encoded type hierarchies, casts, field declarations and method signatures. This facilitates bytecode verification, but it also helps reverse engineers. To obfuscate the type information, we combine three transformations. Class hierarchy flattening removes as much of the type hierarchy from programs as possible. Interface merging and object factory insertion further remove type information from casts, method signatures, and object creation sites. We evaluate these techniques with a prototype tool for Java bytecode. On real-life programs from the DaCapo benchmark suite, we demonstrate that our approach effectively hinders human and tool analysis with limited overhead.

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“…The goal of software protection through code obfuscation is to transform the source code of an application to the point that it becomes unintelligible to automated program comprehension and analysis tools [13]. The motivation for obfuscating code arises from the problem of software piracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metrics-based Evaluation of Slicing Obfuscations

Bartolini

Castagnini

Martinelli

2007

Third International Symposium on Information Assurance and Security

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An obfuscation aims to transform a program, without affecting its functionality, so that some secret data within the program can be hidden for as long as possible from an adversary armed with reverse engineering tools. Slicing is a reverse engineering technique which produces a subset of a program that is dependent on a particular program point and is used to aid in program comprehension. Thus slicing could be used as a way of attacking obfuscated programs.In this contribution, we highlight a few obfuscating transforms that were proposed in an earlier publication for making attacks difficult to mount using slicers and then illustrate an experimental design to evaluate the strength of these transforms with respect to well defined slicing metrics.

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A Survey of Control-Flow Obfuscations

Cited by 25 publications

References 6 publications

Hardware-enforced Protection against Software Reverse-Engineering based on an Instruction Set Encoding

Hardware-enforced Protection against Software Reverse-Engineering based on an Instruction Set Encoding

Pushing Java Type Obfuscation to the Limit

Metrics-based Evaluation of Slicing Obfuscations

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