Paper Info
Title
Stochastic optimization of program obfuscation.
Abstract
Program obfuscation is a common practice in software development to obscure source code or binary code, in order to prevent humans from understanding the purpose or logic of software. It protects intellectual property and deters malicious attacks. While tremendous efforts have been devoted to the development of various obfuscation techniques, we have relatively little knowledge on how to most effectively use them together. The biggest challenge lies in identifying the most effective combination of obfuscation techniques. This paper presents a unified framework to optimize program obfuscation. Given an input program P and a set T of obfuscation transformations, our technique can automatically identify a sequence seq = 〈t2, t2, ... , tn〉 (∀i ε [1, n]. ti ε T), such that applying ti in order on P yields the optimal obfuscation performance. We model the process of searching for seq as a mathematical optimization problem. The key technical contributions of this paper are: (1) an obscurity language model to assess obfuscation effectiveness/optimality, and (2) a guided stochastic algorithm based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to search for the optimal solution seq. We have realized the framework in a tool Closure* for JavaScript, and evaluated it on 25 most starred JavaScript projects on GitHub (19K lines of code). Our machinery study shows that Closure* outperforms the well-known Google Closure Compiler by defending 26% of the attacks initiated by JSNice. Our human study also reveals that Closure* is practical and can reduce the human attack success rate by 30%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ICSE.2017.28
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
program obfuscation, obscurity language model, markov chain monte carlo methods
Stochastic optimization,Programming language,Source code,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Compiler,Obfuscation (software),Obfuscation,Software development,JavaScript,Source lines of code
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
978-1-5386-3869-9
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
23
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Han Liu1698.01
Chengnian Sun2291.92
Zhendong Su390.48
Yu Jiang434656.49
Ming Gu555474.82
Jia-guang Sun61807134.30