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Obfuscation techniques are a general category of software protections widely adopted to prevent malicious tampering of the code by making applications more difficult to understand and thus harder to modify. Obfuscation techniques are…

Program obfuscation is a widely employed approach for software intellectual property protection. However, general obfuscation methods (e.g., lexical obfuscation, control obfuscation) implemented in mainstream obfuscation tools are heuristic…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

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…

To counter software reverse engineering or tampering, software obfuscation tools can be used. However, such tools to a large degree hard-code how the obfuscations are deployed. They hence lack resilience and stealth in the face of many…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for code vulnerability detection, their reliability and robustness across diverse vulnerability types have become a pressing concern. In traditional adversarial settings, code…

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…

Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger…

Protecting source code against reverse engineering and theft is an important problem. The goal is to carry out computations using confidential algorithms on an untrusted party while ensuring confidentiality of algorithms. This problem has…

In the domain of practical software protection against man-at-the-end attacks such as software reverse engineering and tampering, much of the scientific literature is plagued by the use of subpar methods to evaluate the protections'…

Software obfuscation is a crucial technology to protect intellectual property and manage digital rights within our society. Despite its huge practical importance, both commercial and academic state-of-the-art obfuscation methods are…

Code obfuscation is a popular approach to turn program comprehension and analysis harder, with the aim of mitigating threats related to malicious reverse engineering and code tampering. However, programming languages that compile to high…

Program obfuscation is increasingly popular among malware creators. Objectively comparing different malware detection approaches with respect to their resilience against obfuscation is challenging. To the best of our knowledge, there is no…

Plagiarism in programming assignments is a persistent issue in computer science education, increasingly complicated by the emergence of automated obfuscation attacks. While software plagiarism detectors are widely used to identify…

Plagiarism detection in programming education faces growing challenges due to increasingly sophisticated obfuscation techniques, particularly automated refactoring-based attacks. While code plagiarism detection systems used in education…

With the advent of new technologies, using various formats of digital gadgets is becoming widespread. In today's world, where everyday tasks are inevitable without technology, this extensive use of computers paves the way for malicious…

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous due to centralization of private user information, contacts, messages and multiple sensors. Google Android, an open-source mobile Operating System (OS), is currently the market leader. Android…

Program obfuscation is an important software protection technique that prevents attackers from revealing the programming logic and design of the software. We introduce translingual obfuscation, a new software obfuscation scheme which makes…

Empirical research in reverse engineering and software protection is crucial for evaluating the efficacy of methods designed to protect software against unauthorized access and tampering. However, conducting such studies with professional…

Advances in reverse engineering make it challenging to deploy any on-chip information in a way that is hidden from a determined attacker. A variety of techniques have been proposed for design obfuscation including look-alike cells in which…