Mechanisms for Source Code Obfuscation in C: Novel Techniques and Implementation

Abstract

Due to exponential growth of internet, there is abundant assistance available online to learn programming languages much more efficiently. Most of the programmers use this valuable knowledge for the constructive purpose, whereas some of them are using this for the illegal means like unethical hacking, code spoofing, reverse engineering and many more. So to protect the applications from the anonymous attackers, the respective source codes are secured by converting them in the form of .exe, .jar, .bat, .property, .class and .jad files to store at the cloud server end. But most of the repositories store the bare source code at their cloud server end, which is inevitably a feast to the attackers. So to secure the bare source codes, obfuscation techniques are playing a vital role which eventually camouflage the written logic and leave the attacker in confused mode. So as a tiny step towards this idea of obfuscation, this paper presents seven available C obfuscators and four novel data obfuscation techniques that are being applied on ‘+’ arithmetic operator that may lead to the new obfuscation arena.