Flexible software protection

Abstract

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 attacks. To counter this problem, we propose the novel concept of flexible obfuscators, which implement protections in terms of data structures and APIs already present in the application to be protected. The protections are hence tailored to the application in which they are deployed, making them less learnable and less distinguishable. In our research, we concretized the flexible protection concept for opaque predicates. We designed an interface to enable the reuse of existing data structures and APIs in injected opaque predicates, we analyzed their resilience and stealth, we implemented a proof-of-concept flexible obfuscator, and we evaluated it on a number of real-world use cases. This paper presents an in-depth motivation for our work, the design of the interface, an in-depth security analysis, and a feasibility report based on our experimental evaluation. The findings are that flexible opaque predicates indeed provide strong resilience and improved stealth, but also that their deployment is costly, and that they should hence be used sparsely to protect only the most security-sensitive code fragments that do not dominate performance. Flexible obfuscation therefor delivers an expensive but also more durable new weapon in the ever ongoing software protection arms race.