A graph approach to quantitative analysis of control-flow obfuscating transformations

Authors:
Hsin-Yi Tsai;Yu-Lun Huang;David Wagner
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan;Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Modern obfuscation techniques are intended to discourage reverse engineering and malicious tampering of software programs. We study control-flow obfuscation, which works by modifying the control flow of the program to be obfuscated, and observe that it is difficult to evaluate the robustness of these obfuscation techniques. In this paper, we present a framework for quantitative analysis of control-flow obfuscating transformations. Our framework is based upon the control-flow graph of the program, and we show that many existing control-flow obfuscation techniques can be expressed as a sequence of basic transformations on these graphs. We also propose a new measure of the difficulty of reversing these obfuscated programs, and we show that our framework can be used to easily evaluate the space penalty due to the transformations.