Can a program reverse-engineer itself?

  • Authors:
  • Emil Simion

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Universitatea din Bucureşti, Bucharest, Romania

  • Venue:
  • IMACC'11 Proceedings of the 13th IMA international conference on Cryptography and Coding
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Shape-memory alloys are metal pieces that "remember" their original cold-forged shapes and return to the pre-deformed shape after heating. In this work we construct a software analogous of shape-memory alloys: programs whose code resists obfuscation. We show how to pour arbitrary functions into protective envelops that allow recovering the functions' exact initial code after obfuscation. We explicit the theoretical foundations of our method and provide a concrete implementation in Scheme.