A Framework for Obfuscated Interpretation

Software protection via obscurity is now considered fundamental for securing software systems. This paper proposes a framework for obfuscating the program interpretation instead of obfuscating the program itself. The obfuscated interpretation enables us to hide functionality of a given program P unless the interpretation being taken is revealed. The proposed framework employs a finite state machine (FSM) based interpreter to give the context-dependent semantics to each instruction in P; thus, attempts to statically analyze the relation between instructions and their semantics will not succeed. Considering that the instruction stream (execution sequence) of P varies according to the input to P, we give a systematic method to construct P whose instruction stream is always interpreted correctly regardless of its input. Our framework is easily applied to conventional computer systems by adding a FSM unit to virtual machines such as Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Common Language Runtime (C...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACSW
• Authors: Akito Monden, Antoine Monsifrot, Clark D. Thomborson
• Keywords: ACSW 2004, ACSW 2007, Finite State Machine, Instruction Stream, Virtual Machine