Software Obfuscation on a Theoretical Basis and Its Implementation

Toshio OGISO; Yusuke SAKABE; Masakazu SOSHI; Atsuko MIYAJI

Software Obfuscation on a Theoretical Basis and Its Implementation

Toshio OGISO, Yusuke SAKABE, Masakazu SOSHI, Atsuko MIYAJI

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Software obfuscation is a promising approach to protect intellectual property rights and secret information of software in untrusted environments. Unfortunately previous software obfuscation techniques share a major drawback that they do not have a theoretical basis and thus it is unclear how effective they are. Therefore we propose new software obfuscation techniques in this paper. The techniques are based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis of software programs. The essence of our obfuscation techniques is a new complexity problem to precisely determine the address a function pointer points to in the presence of arrays of function pointers. We show that the problem is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, we have already implemented a prototype tool that obfuscates C programs according to our proposed techniques and in this paper we describe the implementation and discuss the experiments results.

Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals Vol.E86-A No.1 pp.176-186

Publication Date: 2003/01/01

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Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Cryptography and Information Security)

Category: Protocols etc.

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Toshio OGISO, Yusuke SAKABE, Masakazu SOSHI, Atsuko MIYAJI, "Software Obfuscation on a Theoretical Basis and Its Implementation" in IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals, vol. E86-A, no. 1, pp. 176-186, January 2003, doi: .
Abstract: Software obfuscation is a promising approach to protect intellectual property rights and secret information of software in untrusted environments. Unfortunately previous software obfuscation techniques share a major drawback that they do not have a theoretical basis and thus it is unclear how effective they are. Therefore we propose new software obfuscation techniques in this paper. The techniques are based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis of software programs. The essence of our obfuscation techniques is a new complexity problem to precisely determine the address a function pointer points to in the presence of arrays of function pointers. We show that the problem is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, we have already implemented a prototype tool that obfuscates C programs according to our proposed techniques and in this paper we describe the implementation and discuss the experiments results.
URL: https://globals.ieice.org/en_transactions/fundamentals/10.1587/e86-a_1_176/_p

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@ARTICLE{e86-a_1_176,
author={Toshio OGISO, Yusuke SAKABE, Masakazu SOSHI, Atsuko MIYAJI, },
journal={IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals},
title={Software Obfuscation on a Theoretical Basis and Its Implementation},
year={2003},
volume={E86-A},
number={1},
pages={176-186},
abstract={Software obfuscation is a promising approach to protect intellectual property rights and secret information of software in untrusted environments. Unfortunately previous software obfuscation techniques share a major drawback that they do not have a theoretical basis and thus it is unclear how effective they are. Therefore we propose new software obfuscation techniques in this paper. The techniques are based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis of software programs. The essence of our obfuscation techniques is a new complexity problem to precisely determine the address a function pointer points to in the presence of arrays of function pointers. We show that the problem is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, we have already implemented a prototype tool that obfuscates C programs according to our proposed techniques and in this paper we describe the implementation and discuss the experiments results.},
keywords={},
doi={},
ISSN={},
month={January},}

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TY - JOUR
TI - Software Obfuscation on a Theoretical Basis and Its Implementation
T2 - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals
SP - 176
EP - 186
AU - Toshio OGISO
AU - Yusuke SAKABE
AU - Masakazu SOSHI
AU - Atsuko MIYAJI
PY - 2003
DO -
JO - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals
SN -
VL - E86-A
IS - 1
JA - IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals
Y1 - January 2003
AB - Software obfuscation is a promising approach to protect intellectual property rights and secret information of software in untrusted environments. Unfortunately previous software obfuscation techniques share a major drawback that they do not have a theoretical basis and thus it is unclear how effective they are. Therefore we propose new software obfuscation techniques in this paper. The techniques are based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis of software programs. The essence of our obfuscation techniques is a new complexity problem to precisely determine the address a function pointer points to in the presence of arrays of function pointers. We show that the problem is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, we have already implemented a prototype tool that obfuscates C programs according to our proposed techniques and in this paper we describe the implementation and discuss the experiments results.
ER -