Android obfuscation techniques include not only classic code that were adapted to Android, but also methods target the platform specifically. This work examines status-quo of obfuscation, detection and deobfuscation. Specifically, it first summarizes approaches are commonly used by app developers for optimization, protect their software against theft tampering frequently misused malware circumv...

Obfuscation is challenging; we currently have practical candidates with rather vague security guarantees on the one side, and theoretical constructions which have recently experienced jeopardizing attacks against the underlying cryptographic assumptions on the other side. This motivates us to study and present robust combiners for obfuscators, which integrate several candidate obfuscators into ...

A 25-gigabyte “point obfuscation” challenge “using security parameter 60” was announced at the Crypto 2014 rump session; “point obfuscation” is another name for password hashing. This paper shows that the particular matrix-multiplication hash function used in the challenge is much less secure than previous password-hashing functions are believed to be. This paper’s attack algorithm broke the ch...

Shape-memory alloys are metal pieces that "remember" their original cold-forged shapes and return to the pre-deformed shape after heating. In this work we construct a software analogous of shape-memory alloys: programs whose code resists obfuscation. We show how to pour arbitrary functions into protective envelops that allow recovering the functions' exact initial code after obfuscation. We exp...

In the past decade, code obfuscation techniques have become increasingly popular due to their wide applications on malware and the numerous violations of intellectual property caused by reverse engineering. In this work, we examine common techniques used for code obfuscation and provide an outline of the design principles of our tool Confuse. Confuse is an LLVM tool which modifies the standard ...

This paper develops search-theoretic models in which it is individually rational for firms to engage in obfuscation. It considers oligopoly competition between firms selling a homogeneous good to a population of rational consumers who incur search costs to learn each firm’s price. Search costs are endogenized: obfuscation is equated with unobservable actions that make it more time-consuming to ...

An obfuscator is an algorithm that translates circuits into functionally-equivalent similarly-sized circuits that are hard to understand. Efficient obfuscators would have many applications in cryptography. Until recently, theoretical progress has mainly been limited to no-go results. Recent works have proposed the first efficient obfuscation algorithms for classical logic circuits, based on a n...