A survey of control-flow obfuscations

Authors:
Anirban Majumdar;Clark Thomborson;Stephen Drape
Affiliations:
Secure Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Secure Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Secure Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Venue:
ICISS'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Information Systems Security
Year:
2006

Citing 7
Cited 4

Precise flow-insensitive may-alias analysis is NP-hard

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Manufacturing cheap, resilient, and stealthy opaque constructs

POPL '98 Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Protection of Software-Based Survivability Mechanisms

DSN '01 Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (formerly: FTCS)
An Approach to the Obfuscation of Control-Flow of Sequential Computer Programs

ISC '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Security
Experience with software watermarking

ACSAC '00 Proceedings of the 16th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
Detection of global predicates: techniques and their limitations

Distributed Computing
Manufacturing opaque predicates in distributed systems for code obfuscation

ACSC '06 Proceedings of the 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference - Volume 48

Slicing obfuscations: design, correctness, and evaluation

Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Digital Rights Management
Using purpose capturing signatures to defeat computer virus mutating

ISPEC'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
A novel obfuscation: class hierarchy flattening

FPS'12 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Foundations and Practice of Security
Hardware-enforced Protection against Software Reverse-Engineering based on an Instruction Set Encoding

Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN on Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop 2014

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this short survey, we provide an overview of obfuscation and then shift our focus to outlining various non-trivial control-flow obfuscation techniques. Along the way, we highlight two transforms having provable security properties: the dispatcher model and opaque predicates. We comment on the strength and weaknesses of these transforms and outline difficulties associated in generating generalised classes of these.