2023 Volume 40 Issue 4 Pages 4_37-4_46
This study proposes a framework to evaluate the reliability of obfuscating transformations in program code. The reliability of an obfuscating transformation can be evaluated by whether the transformation makes program code harder to analyze while preserving the functionality. The proposed framework applies obfuscating transformations to a collection of program code, executes the test cases, and measures the ratio of obfuscated program code that pass the test cases and the mean of the distance of opcode sequences before and after obfuscation. Two experiments have been conducted to evaluate the reliability of existing 43 obfuscating transformations implemented in well-known obfuscation tools, Tigress and Obfuscator-LLVM. The proposed framework revealed that there were combinations of obfuscating transformations which did not preserve the functionality of programs, even though each of the transformations worked properly for the programs.
