Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles - Securing Java-Based Mobile Agents through Byte Code Obfuscation Techniques

Abstract

Mobile agents have the ability to relocate computation and then carry communication with their peers locally. The design and implementation of mechanism to relocate computations requires a careful assessment of security issues. If these issues are not addressed properly, mobile agent technology cannot be used to implement real-world applications. To address such issues this paper proposes two code obfuscation techniques [1] for Java-based mobile agents that are compiled into a platform independent byte code format. These techniques will involve applying obfuscating transformations to the mobile agent's byte code in order to protect them against malicious attacks. Consequently these techniques will prevent automatic software analysis tools, De-compilers, from generating correct source code by introducing syntax and semantic errors in the generated source code. The proposed techniques will be applied on sample mobile agent's class files to examine the effectiveness of the techniques in impeding reverse engineering. After obtaining the results, we will reveal the erroneous codes generated by the tested de-compilers.

Symbol diversification of linux binaries

“…In [18], the authors obfuscate the Java byte code through identifier renaming in order to protect the Java-based mobile agents. It is illustrated that through removing the name of the variables and methods the decompiJed code contains numbers of syntax errors.…”

A Survey of Self-protected Mobile Agents

“…Obfuscation techniques are recommended to be used in order to obtain various versions of the same task and thus to provide the mobile agent several equivalent behaviors that generate the same result. A more recent study of this technique can be found in [16].…”