Software obfuscation is a promising approach for protection of intellectual property rights of software in untrusted environments. Unfortunately most of previous obfuscation techniques do not have a theoretical basis and thus it is unclear how effective they are. Therefore in this paper we propose new software obfuscation techniques, which are based on the difficulty of interprocedural analysis...

We report on the second large-scale evaluation of style obfuscation approaches in a shared task on author obfuscation, organized at the PAN 2017 lab on digital text forensics. Author obfuscation means to automatically paraphrase a given text such that state-of-the-art authorship verification approaches misjudge a given pair of documents as having been written by “different authors” if in fact t...

Encryption of data is fundamental to secure communication in the modern world. Beyond encryption of data lies obfuscation, i.e., encryption of functionality. It is well-known that the most powerful means of obfuscating classical programs, so-called “black-box obfuscation,” is provably impossible [BGI+01]. For years since, obfuscation was believed to always be either impossible or useless, depen...

The Android platform has been the dominant mobile platform in recent years resulting inmillions of apps and security threats against those apps. Anti-malware products aim to protect smartphone users from these threats, especially frommalicious apps. However, malware authors use code obfuscation on their apps to evade detection by anti-malware products. To assess the effects of code obfuscation ...

Android applications are frequently plagiarized or maliciously repackaged, and so‰ware obfuscation is a popular protection against these practices. In this study, we present the €rst comprehensive analysis of the use and challenges of so‰ware obfuscation in Android applications. We surveyed 308 Google Play developers about their experiences with obfuscation, €nding that the free ProGuard so‰war...

Program code is a precious asset to its owner. Due to the easyto-reverse nature of Java, code protection for Android apps is of particular importance. To this end, code obfuscation is widely utilized by both legitimate app developers andmalware authors, which complicates the representation of source code or machine code in order to hinder the manual investigation and code analysis. Despite many...

Recent advances in program obfuscation suggest that it is possible to create software that can provably safeguard secret information. However, software systems usually contain large executable code that is updated multiple times and sometimes very frequently. Freshly obfuscating the program for every small update will lead to a considerable efficiency loss. Thus, an extremely desirable property...