Code protection for resource-constrained embedded devices

Authors:
H. Saputra;G. Chen;R. Brooks;N. Vijaykrishnan;M. Kandemir;M. J. Irwin
Affiliations:
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA;The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems
Year:
2004

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Abstract

While the machine neutral Java bytecodes are attractive for code distribution in the highly heterogeneous embedded domain, the well-documented and standardized features also make it difficult to protect these codes. In fact, there are several tools to reverse engineer Java bytecodes. The focus of this work is the design of a substitution-based bytecode obfuscation approach that prevents code from being executed on unauthorized devices. Furthermore, we also improve the resilience of this substitution-based approach to frequency-based attacks. Using various Java class files, we show that our approach is 2.5 to 3 times less computationally intensive as compared to a traditional encryption based approach. Our experiments reveal that the protected class files could not execute on unauthorized clients.