Dispersing proprietary applications as benchmarks through code mutation

Industry vendors hesitate to disseminate proprietary applications to academia and third party vendors. By consequence, the benchmarking process is typically driven by standardized, open-source benchmarks which may be very different from and likely not representative of the real-life applications of interest. This paper proposes code mutation, a novel technique that mutates a proprietary application to complicate reverse engineering so that it can be distributed as a benchmark. The benchmark mutant then serves as a proxy for the proprietary application. The key idea in the proposed code mutation approach is to preserve the proprietary application's dynamic memory access and/or control flow behavior in the benchmark mutant while mutating the rest of the application code. To this end, we compute program slices for memory access operations and/or control flow operations trimmed through constant value and branch profiles; and subsequently mutate the instructions not appearing in these...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Luk Van Ertvelde, Lieven Eeckhout
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Code Mutation, Code Mutation Approach, Programming Languages, Proprietary Application