Experimental design and analysis in software engineering, part 5: analyzing the data
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
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Deobfuscation: Reverse Engineering Obfuscated Code
WCRE '05 Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
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Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Quality of protection
Handbook of Parametric and Nonparametric Statistical Procedures
Handbook of Parametric and Nonparametric Statistical Procedures
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While many obfuscation schemes proposed, none of them satisfy any strong definition of obfuscation. Furthermore secure general-purpose obfuscation algorithms have been proven to be impossible. Nevertheless, obfuscation schemes which in practice slow down malicious reverse-engineering by obstructing code comprehension for even short periods of time are considered a useful protection against malicious reverse engineering. In previous works, the difficulty of reverse engineering has been mainly estimated by means of code metrics, by the computational complexity of static analysis or by comparing the output of de-obfuscating tools. In this paper we take a different approach and assess the difficulty attackers have in understanding and modifying obfuscated code through controlled experiments involving human subjects.