Visible to the public Algorithmic information theory for obfuscation security

TitleAlgorithmic information theory for obfuscation security
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsMohsen, R., Pinto, A. M.
Conference Name2015 12th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE)
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number978-9-8975-8140-3
KeywordsCode Obfuscation, Complexity theory, encoding, Intellectual Property Protection, Kolmogorov Complexity, Measurement, pubcrawl170107, reverse engineering, security, Software
Abstract

The main problem in designing effective code obfuscation is to guarantee security. State of the art obfuscation techniques rely on an unproven concept of security, and therefore are not regarded as provably secure. In this paper, we undertake a theoretical investigation of code obfuscation security based on Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic mutual information. We introduce a new definition of code obfuscation that requires the algorithmic mutual information between a code and its obfuscated version to be minimal, allowing for controlled amount of information to be leaked to an adversary. We argue that our definition avoids the impossibility results of Barak et al. and is more advantageous then obfuscation indistinguishability definition in the sense it is more intuitive, and is algorithmic rather than probabilistic.

URLhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7518023&isnumber=7517992
Citation Keymohsen_algorithmic_2015