It has become common to distribute software in forms that are isomorphic to the original source code. An important example is Java bytecode. Since such codes are easy to decompile, they increase the risk of mahcious reverse engineering attacks.In thii paper we describe the design of a Java code obfus- &OF,a tool which -through the application of code transformations -converts a Java program into an equivalent one that is more difficuh to reverse engineer.We describe a number of transformations which obfuscate control-flow. Transformations are evaluated with respect to potency (To what degree is a human reader confused?), resilience (How well are automatic deobfuscation attacks resisted?), cost (How much time/space overhead is added?), and stealth (How well does obfuscated code blend in with the original code?).The resilience of many control-altering transformations rely on the resilience of opaque predicates. These are boolean valued expressions whose values are known to the obfuscator but difficult to determine for an automatic deobfuscator. We show how to construct resilient, cheap, and stealthy opaque predicates based on the intractability of certain static analysis problems such as alias analysis.

AbstractÐWe identify three types of attack on the intellectual property contained in software and three corresponding technical defenses. A defense against reverse engineering is obfuscation, a process that renders software unintelligible but still functional. A defense against software piracy is watermarking, a process that makes it possible to determine the origin of software. A defense against tampering is tamper-proofing, so that unauthorized modifications to software (for example, to remove a watermark) will result in nonfunctional code. We briefly survey the available technology for each type of defense.

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Software birthmarking relies on unique characteristics that are inherent to a program to identify the program in the event of suspected theft. In this paper we present and empirically evaluate a novel birthmarking technique which uniquely identifies a program through instruction sequences. To evaluate the strength of the birthmarking technique we examine two properties: credibility and resilience to semantics-preserving transformations. We show that the technique provides both high credibility and resilience. Additionally, it complements previously proposed static birthmarking techniques.

Abstract.A software birthmark is a unique characteristic of a program that can be used as a software theft detection technique. In this paper we present and empirically evaluate a novel birthmarking technique -Whole Program Path Birthmarking -which uniquely identifies a program based on a complete control flow trace of its execution. To evaluate the strength of the proposed technique we examine two important properties: credibility and tolerance against program transformations such as optimization and obfuscation. Our evaluation demonstrates that, for the detection of theft of an entire program, Whole Program Path birthmarks are more resilient to attack than previously proposed techniques. In addition, we illustrate several instances where a birthmark can be used to identify program theft even when an embedded watermark was destroyed by program transformation.

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