Program obfuscation is the process of making a program “unintelligible” without changing the program’s underlying input/output behavior. Although there is a long line of work on heuristic techniques for obfuscation, such approaches do not provide any cryptographic guarantee on their effectiveness. A recent result by Garg et al. (FOCS 2013), however, shows that cryptographic program obfuscation ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 CHAPTER

This paper investigates the ethical implications of using adversarial machine learning for purpose obfuscation. We suggest that attacks can be justified by privacy considerations but they also cause collateral damage. To clarify matter, we employ two use cases—facial recognition and medical learning—to evaluate damage counterarguments to privacy-induced attacks. conclude obfuscation data poison...

We construct trapdoor permutations based on (sub-exponential) indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions, thereby providing the first candidate that is not based on the hardness of factoring. Our construction shows that even highly structured primitives, such as trapdoor permutations, can be potentially based on hardness assumptions with noisy structures such as those used in candid...

There are many programming situations where it would be convenient to conceal the meaning of code, or the meaning of certain variables. This can be achieved through program transformations which are grouped under the term obfuscation. Obfuscation is one of a number of techniques that can be employed to protect sensitive areas of code. This paper presents obfuscation methods for the purpose of c...

Web Search is one of the most rapidly growing applications on the internet today. However, the current practice followed by most search engines – of logging and analyzing users’ queries – raises serious privacy concerns. One viable solution to search privacy is query obfuscation, whereby a client-side software attempts to mask real user queries via injection of certain noisy queries. In contras...

Consumers often find it hard to make correct value comparisons between market alternatives. This "choice complexity" partly results from deliberate obfuscation by firms. This review synthesizes a theoretical literature that analyzes the role of choice complexity in otherwise-competitive markets. I identify two general classes of models in the literature: (1) firms’ obfuscation strategy is an in...

In this note we revisit the problem of obfuscation with auxiliary inputs. We show that the existence of indistinguishablity obfuscation (iO) implies that all functions with sufficient “pseudoentropy” cannot be obfuscated with respect to a virtual box definition (VBB) in the presence of (dependent) auxiliary input. Namely, we show that for any candidate obfuscation O and for any function family ...

Software obfuscation is intended to protect a program by thwarting reverse engineering. Several types of software obfuscation have been proposed, and control-flow obfuscation is a commonly adopted one. In this paper, we present a framework to evaluate parallel control-flow obfuscation, which raises difficulty of reverse engineering by increasing parallelism of a program. We also define a contro...

Software obfuscation or obscuring a software is an approach to defeat the practice of reverse engineering a software for using its functionality illegally in the development of another software. Java applications are more amenable to reverse engineering and re-engineering attacks through methods such as decompilation because Java class files store the program in a semi complied form called 'byt...