Program obfuscation: a quantitative approach

  • Authors:

  • Bertrand Anckaert;Matias Madou;Bjorn De Sutter;Bruno De Bus;Koen De Bosschere;Bart Preneel

  • Affiliations:

  • Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Quality of protection
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Despite the recent advances in the theory underlying obfuscation, there still is a need to evaluate the quality of practical obfuscating transformations more quickly and easily. This paper presents the first steps toward a comprehensive evaluation suite consisting of a number of deobfuscating transformations and complexity metrics that can be readily applied on existing and future transformations in the domain of binary obfuscation. In particular, a framework based on software complexity metrics measuring four program properties: code, control flow, data and data flow is suggested. A number of well-known obfuscating and deobfuscating transformations are evaluated based upon their impact on a set of complexity metrics. This enables us to quantitatively evaluate the potency of the (de)obfuscating transformations.