Related papers: On Secure and Usable Program Obfuscation: A Survey

Code obfuscation is the conversion of original source code into a functionally equivalent but less readable form, aiming to prevent reverse engineering and intellectual property theft. This is a challenging task since it is crucial to…

Quantum copy protection, introduced by Aaronson, enables giving out a quantum program-description that cannot be meaningfully duplicated. Despite over a decade of study, copy protection is only known to be possible for a very limited class…

The ability to efficiently detect the software protections used is at a prime to facilitate the selection and application of adequate deob-fuscation techniques. We present a novel approach that combines semantic reasoning techniques with…

Software security is of utmost importance for most software systems. Developers must systematically select, plan, design, implement, and especially, maintain and evolve security features -- functionalities to mitigate attacks or protect…

As the privacy risks posed by camera surveillance and facial recognition have grown, so has the research into privacy preservation algorithms. Among these, visual privacy preservation algorithms attempt to impart bodily privacy to subjects…

The Android ecosystem is vulnerable to issues such as app repackaging, counterfeiting, and piracy, threatening both developers and users. To mitigate these risks, developers often employ code obfuscation techniques. However, while effective…

Obfuscating compilers protect a software by obscuring its meaning and impeding the reconstruction of its original source code. The typical concern when defining such compilers is their robustness against reverse engineering and the…

The \emph{International Obfuscated C Code Contest} was a programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated yet succinct C code. By \emph{contrast}, an interest herein is in programs which are, \emph{in a sense}, \emph{easily} seen to…

Threats associated with the untrusted fabrication of integrated circuits (ICs) are numerous: piracy, overproduction, reverse engineering, hardware trojans, etc. The use of reconfigurable elements (i.e., look-up tables as in FPGAs) is a…

Security is an important facet of integrated circuit design for many applications. IP privacy and Trojan insertion are growing threats as circuit fabrication in advanced nodes almost inevitably relies on untrusted foundries. A proposed…

Open Source Software (OSS) security and resilience are worldwide phenomena hampering economic and technological innovation. OSS vulnerabilities can cause unauthorized access, data breaches, network disruptions, and privacy violations,…

Tamper-resistance is a fundamental software security research area. Many approaches have been proposed to thwart specific procedures of tampering, e.g., obfuscation and self-checksumming. However, to our best knowledge, none of them can…

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in code generation tasks. However, there are still gaps before they can be fully applied in actual software development processes. Accurately assessing the code generation…

Provenance is an increasing concern due to the ongoing revolution in sharing and processing scientific data on the Web and in other computer systems. It is proposed that many computer systems will need to become provenance-aware in order to…

To reduce the cost of ICs and to meet the market's demand, a considerable portion of manufacturing supply chain, including silicon fabrication, packaging and testing may be pushed offshore. Utilizing a global IC manufacturing supply chain,…

We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…

Obfuscation poses a persistent challenge for software engineering tasks such as program comprehension, maintenance, testing, and vulnerability detection. While compiler optimizations and third-party code often introduce transformations that…

Malware constitutes a major global risk affecting millions of users each year. Standard algorithms in detection systems perform insufficiently when dealing with malware passed through obfuscation tools. We illustrate this studying in detail…

The threat of hardware reverse engineering is a growing concern for a large number of applications. A main defense strategy against reverse engineering is hardware obfuscation. In this paper, we investigate physical obfuscation techniques,…

One popular group of defense techniques against adversarial attacks is based on injecting stochastic noise into the network. The main source of robustness of such stochastic defenses however is often due to the obfuscation of the gradients,…