A framework for obfuscated interpretation

Authors:
Akito Monden;Antoine Monsifrot;Clark Thomborson
Affiliations:
The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Venue:
ACSW Frontiers '04 Proceedings of the second workshop on Australasian information security, Data Mining and Web Intelligence, and Software Internationalisation - Volume 32
Year:
2004

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Abstract

Software protection via obscurity is now considered fundamental for securing software systems. This paper proposes a framework for obfuscating the program interpretation instead of obfuscating the program itself. The obfuscated interpretation enables us to hide functionality of a given program P unless the interpretation being taken is revealed. The proposed framework employs a finite state machine (FSM) based interpreter to give the context-dependent semantics to each instruction in P; thus, attempts to statically analyze the relation between instructions and their semantics will not succeed. Considering that the instruction stream (execution sequence) of P varies according to the input to P, we give a systematic method to construct P whose instruction stream is always interpreted correctly regardless of its input. Our framework is easily applied to conventional computer systems by adding a FSM unit to virtual machines such as Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Common Language Runtime (CLR).