Related papers: Towards a Theory of Special-purpose Program Obfusc…

Code obfuscation aims at protecting Intellectual Property and other secrets embedded into software from being retrieved. Recent works leverage advances in artificial intelligence with the hope of getting blackbox deobfuscators completely…

Software obfuscation techniques can prevent binary diffing techniques from locating vulnerable code by obfuscating the third-party code, to achieve the purpose of protecting embedded device software. With the rapid development of binary…

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…

Virtual black-box obfuscation is a strong cryptographic primitive: it encrypts a circuit while maintaining its full input/output functionality. A remarkable result by Barak et al. (Crypto 2001) shows that a general obfuscator that…

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…

To counter man-at-the-end attacks such as reverse engineering and tampering, software is often protected with techniques that require support modules to be linked into the application. It is well-known, however, that attackers can exploit…

While recent progress in quantum hardware open the door for significant speedup in certain key areas (cryptography, biology, chemistry, optimization, machine learning, etc), quantum algorithms are still hard to implement right, and the…

Malware authors often use cryptographic tools such as XOR encryption and block ciphers like AES to obfuscate part of the malware to evade detection. Use of cryptography may give the impression that these obfuscation techniques have some…

Control flow obfuscation (CFO) alters the control flow path of a program without altering its semantics. Existing literature has proposed several techniques; however, a quick survey reveals a lack of clarity in the types of techniques…

Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…

Education in the practical applications of logic and proving such as the formal specification and verification of computer programs is substantially hampered by the fact that most time and effort that is invested in proving is actually…

Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…

A major unresolved question in quantum cryptography is whether it is possible to obfuscate arbitrary quantum computation. Indeed, there is much yet to understand about the feasibility of quantum obfuscation even in the classical oracle…

In today's world, critical infrastructure is often controlled by computing systems. This introduces new risks for cyber attacks, which can compromise the security and disrupt the functionality of these systems. It is therefore necessary to…

Distinguishing AI-generated code from human-written code is becoming crucial for tasks such as authorship attribution, content tracking, and misuse detection. Based on this, N-gram-based watermarking schemes have emerged as prominent, which…

Formal methods have been largely thought of in the context of safety-critical systems, where they have achieved major acceptance. Tens of millions of people trust their lives every day to such systems, based on formal proofs rather than…

Virtualization-based obfuscation produces extremely large and structurally complex binaries, posing challenges for LLM-based analysis due to input size limits and the need for large-scale labeled data. We address this by focusing on…

Indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) has emerged as a powerful cryptographic primitive with many implications. While classical iO, combined with the infinitely-often worst-case hardness of $\mathsf{NP}$, is known to imply one-way functions…

This paper proposes a new obfuscation technique of a communication protocol that is aimed at making the reverse engineering of the protocol more complex. The obfuscation is based on the transformation of protocol message format…

Largely known for attack scenarios, code reuse techniques at a closer look reveal properties that are appealing also for program obfuscation. We explore the popular return-oriented programming paradigm under this light, transforming program…