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Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field 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…

In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…

Intent obfuscation is a common tactic in adversarial situations, enabling the attacker to both manipulate the target system and avoid culpability. Surprisingly, it has rarely been implemented in adversarial attacks on machine learning…

Obfuscation in privacy engineering denotes a diverse set of data operations aimed at reducing the privacy loss that users incur in by participating in digital systems. Obfuscation's domain of application is vast: privacy-preserving database…

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…

Obfuscation is a technique for protecting hardware intellectual property (IP) blocks against reverse engineering, piracy, and malicious modifications. Current obfuscation efforts mainly focus on functional locking of a design to prevent…

Code obfuscation is widely adopted in modern software development to protect intellectual property and hinder reverse engineering, but it also provides attackers with a powerful means to conceal malicious logic inside otherwise legitimate…

Passive operating system fingerprinting reveals valuable information to the defenders of heterogeneous private networks; at the same time, attackers can use fingerprinting to reconnoiter networks, so defenders need obfuscation techniques to…

Code obfuscation is a major tool for protecting software intellectual property from attacks such as reverse engineering or code tampering. Yet, recently proposed (automated) attacks based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) shows very…

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…

To avoid detection, adversaries often use command-line obfuscation. There are numerous techniques of the command-line obfuscation, all designed to alter the command-line syntax without affecting its original functionality. This variability…

A key element in defending computer networks is to recognize the types of cyber attacks based on the observed malicious activities. Obfuscation onto what could have been observed of an attack sequence may lead to mis-interpretation of its…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in software engineering, yet their effectiveness for binary analysis remains unexplored. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of commercial LLMs for assembly code deobfuscation.…

The outsourced manufacturing of integrated circuits has increased the risk of intellectual property theft. In response, logic locking techniques have been developed for protecting designs by adding programmable elements to the circuit.…

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…

Machine-learning based intrusion detection classifiers are able to detect unknown attacks, but at the same time, they may be susceptible to evasion by obfuscation techniques. An adversary intruder which possesses a crucial knowledge about a…

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…

Automated tests play an important role in software evolution because they can rapidly detect faults introduced during changes. In practice, code-coverage metrics are often used as criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites with…

A recurring problem in software development is incorrect decision making on the techniques, methods and tools to be used. Mostly, these decisions are based on developers' perceptions about them. A factor influencing people's perceptions is…