Evaluation of Software Obfuscation Based on the Randomness of Instructions

Abstract

This paper quantifies the difficulty of program analysis based on the information theory. The basic idea is to consider that a program is ultimately obfuscated if instructions appear at random; that is, (1) all instructions has an equal frequency of appearance, and (2) there is no pattern observed in the instruction sequence. We quantified (1) based on the entropy and (2) based on the Kolmogorov complexity. We evaluated the feasibility of our proposal through a case study.