Control flow based obfuscation

A software obfuscator is a program O to transform a source program P for protection against malicious reverse engineering. O should be correct (O(P) has same functionality with P), resilient (O(P) is resilient against attacks), and effective (O(P) is not too much slower than P). In this paper we describe the design of an obfuscator which consists of two parts. The first part extracts the control flow information from the program and saves it in another process named Monitor-process. The second part protects Monitor-process converting it into an Aucsmith like self-modifying version. We prove the correctness of the obfuscation scheme. We assess its resilience and efficiency to show that both are high. This supports the claim that our approach is practical. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2 [Software Engineering]: Miscellaneous General Terms: Security, Design, Experimentation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DRM
• Authors: Jun Ge, Soma Chaudhuri, Akhilesh Tyagi
• Keywords: DRM 2005, Malicious Reverse Engineering, Process Named Monitor-process, Software Obfuscator