Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
addClaim

Quantitative measures for code obfuscation security

Authors: Mohsen, Rabih;

Quantitative measures for code obfuscation security

Abstract

In this thesis we establish a quantitative framework to measure and study the security of code obfuscation, an effective software protection method that defends software against malicious reverse engineering. Despite the recent positive result by Garg et al.[GGH+13] that shows the possibility of obfuscating using indistinguishability obfuscation definition, code obfuscation has two major challenges: firstly, the lack of theoretical foundation that is necessary to define and reason about code obfuscation security; secondly, it is an open problem whether there exists security metrics that measure and certify the current state-of-the-art of code obfuscation techniques. To address these challenges, we followed a research methodology that consists of the following main routes: a formal approach to build a theory that captures, defines and measures the security of code obfuscation, and an experimental approach that provides empirical evidence about the soundness and validity of the proposed theory and metrics. To this end, we propose Algorithmic Information Theory, known as Kolmogorov complexity, as a theoretical and practical model to define, study, and measure the security of code obfuscation. We introduce the notion of unintelligibility, an intuitive way to define code obfuscation, and argue that it is not sufficient to capture the security of code obfuscation. We then present a more powerful security definition that is based on the algorithmic mutual information, and show that is able to effectively capture code obfuscation security. We apply our proposed definition to prove the possibility of obtaining security in code obfuscation under reasonable assumptions. We model adversaries with deobfuscation capabilities that explicitly realise the required properties for a successful deobfuscation attack. We build a quantitative model that comprises a set of security metrics, which are derived from our proposed theory and based on lossless compression, aiming to measure the quality of code obfuscation security. We propose normalised information distance NID as a metric to measure code obfuscation resilience, and establish the relation between our security definition and the normalised information distance. We show that if the security conditions for code obfuscations are satisfied (the extreme case) then the NID tends to be close to one, which is the maximum value that can be achieved. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation to provide empirical validation for the proposed metrics. Our results show that the proposed measures are positively correlated with the degree of obfuscation resilience to an attacker using decompilers, i.e. the percentage of the clear code that was not recovered by an attacker, which indicates a positive relationship with the obfuscation resilience factor.

Country
United Kingdom
Related Organizations
Keywords

000

  • BIP!
    Impact byBIP!
    selected citations
    These citations are derived from selected sources.
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    0
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Average
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green
Upload OA version
Are you the author of this publication? Upload your Open Access version to Zenodo!
It’s fast and easy, just two clicks!