A survey of control-flow obfuscations
Anirban Majumdar,Clark Thomborson,Stephen Drape +2 more
- 19 Dec 2006
- pp 353-356
TL;DR: A short survey of obfuscation techniques can be found in this article, where the authors provide an overview of control flow obfuscation and then shift their focus to outlining various non-trivial control-flow obfuscation methods.
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Abstract: In this short survey, we provide an overview of obfuscation and then shift our focus to outlining various non-trivial control-flow obfuscation techniques. Along the way, we highlight two transforms having provable security properties: the dispatcher model and opaque predicates. We comment on the strength and weaknesses of these transforms and outline difficulties associated in generating generalised classes of these.
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Citations
Abstract extensionality: on the properties of incomplete abstract interpretations
Roberto Bruni,Roberto Giacobazzi,Roberta Gori,Isabel Garcia-Contreras,Dusko Pavlovic +4 more
- 20 Dec 2019
TL;DR: This paper generalises the notion of extensional (functional) equivalence of programs to abstract equivalences induced by abstract interpretations, and introduces a novel technique for building incompleteness cliques of extensionally equivalent yet abstractly distinguishable programs.
25
Intellectual Property Protection using Obfuscation
Stephen Drape
- 01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: The definition of Code Obfuscation and its applications are described in more detail in Collberg, Barak, and Barak (2015).
Slicing Aided Design of Obfuscating Transforms
Stephen Drape,Anirban Majumdar,Clark Thomborson +2 more
- 11 Jul 2007
TL;DR: This paper presents a novel approach to creating obfuscating transforms which are designed to survive slicing attacks, and shows how the information gained from slicing a program can be utilised to aid in manufacturing obfuscations that are more resistant to slicing.
Patent
System and method for branch extraction obfuscation
Ginger M. Myles,Julien Lerouge,Tanya Michelle Lattner,Augustin J. Farrugia +3 more
- 26 Aug 2008
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a method for obfuscating code by extracting a conditional statement from a computer program, creating a function equivalent to the conditional statement, and creating a pointer that points to the function, storing the pointer in an array of pointers.
16
REDIR: Automated Static Detection of Obfuscated Anti-Debugging Techniques
Adam J. Smith,Robert F. Mills,Adam R. Bryant,Gilbert L. Peterson,Michael R. Grimaila +4 more
- 19 May 2014
TL;DR: The Rule Engine Detection by Intermediate Representation (REDIR) system for automated static detection of obfuscated anti-debugging techniques is a prototype designed to help the RCE analyst improve performance through this tedious task.
References
A Taxonomy of Obfuscating Transformations
Christian Collberg,Clark Thomborson,Douglas Low +2 more
- 01 Jul 1997
TL;DR: It is argued that automatic code obfuscation is currently the most viable method for preventing reverse engineering and the design of a code obfuscator is described, a tool which converts a program into an equivalent one that is more diicult to understand and reverse engineer.
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Manufacturing cheap, resilient, and stealthy opaque constructs
Christian Collberg,Clark Thomborson,Douglas Low +2 more
- 21 Jan 1998
TL;DR: The design of a Java code obfuscator is described, a tool which - through the application of code transformations - converts a Java program into an equivalent one that is more difficult to reverse engineer.
Precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is NP-hard
TL;DR: This article shows that precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is NP-hard given arbitrary levels of pointers and arbitrary pointer dereferencing.
151
Detection of global predicates: techniques and their limitations
Craig M. Chase,Vijay K. Garg +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that the problem of predicate detection in distributed systems is NP-complete and each class of predicate can be equivalently characterized by the degree of non-determinism present in the algorithm.
Protection of software-based survivability mechanisms
Chenxi Wang,Jack W. Davidson,Jonathan Hill,John C. Knight +3 more
- 01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: A theoretical result is presented which shows that a precise analysis of the transformed program, in the general case, is NP-hard and the applicability of the techniques is demonstrated with empirical results.
50
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