Towards Experimental Evaluation of Code Obfuscation Techniques

While many obfuscation schemes proposed, none of them satisfy any strong definition of obfuscation. Furthermore secure generalpurpose obfuscation algorithms have been proven to be impossible. Nevertheless, obfuscation schemes which in practice slow down malicious reverse-engineering by obstructing code comprehension for even short periods of time are considered a useful protection against malicious reverse engineering. In previous works, the difficulty of reverse engineering has been mainly estimated by means of code metrics, by the computational complexity of static analysis or by comparing the output of de-obfuscating tools. In this paper we take a different approach and assess the difficulty attackers have in understanding and modifying obfuscated code through controlled experiments involving human subjects

The Effectiveness of Source Code Obfuscation: an Experimental Assessment

Source code obfuscation is a protection mechanism widely used to limit the possibility of malicious reverse engineering or attack activities on a software system. Although several code obfuscation techniques and tools are available, little knowledge is available about the capability of obfuscation to reduce attackers’ efficiency, and the contexts in which such an efficiency may vary. This paper reports the outcome of two controlled experiments meant to measure the ability of subjects to understand and modify decompiled, obfuscated Java code, compared to decompiled, clear code. Results quantify to what extent code obfuscation is able to make attacks more difficult to be performed, and reveal that obfuscation can mitigate the effect of factors that can alter the likelihood of a successful attack, such as the attackers’ skill and experience, or the intrinsic characteristics of the system under attack

New Zealand Threading Software Watermarks Supervisor:

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Distributing trust verification to increase application performance

The remote trust problem aims to address the issue of verifying the execution of a program running on an untrusted host which communicates regularly with a trusted server. One proposed solution to this problem relies on a centralized scheme using assertions and replication to withhold usable services from a tampered client. We show how to extend such a scheme to a distributed trusted hardware such as tamper-resistant smartcards. We compared the performance and security of the proposed distributed system to the original centralized scheme on a case study. Our results indicate that, compared to a centralized scheme, our distributed trust scheme has dramatically lower network traffic, and smaller memory and computational requirements on the trusted server

A Functional Taxonomy for Software Watermarking

Despite the recent surge of interest in digital watermarking technology from the research community, we lack a comprehensive and precise terminology for software watermarking. In this paper, we attempt to fill that gap by giving distinctive names for the various protective functions served by software watermarks: Validation Mark, Licensing Mark, Authorship Mark and Fingerprinting Mark. We identify the desirable properties and specific vulnerabilities of each type of watermark, and we illustrate the utility of our terminology in a discussion of recent results in software watermarking