Generating Functionally Equivalent Programs Having Non-Isomorphic Control-Flow Graphs
This addresses a key problem in software security for developers seeking to protect program structure from reverse engineering, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing obfuscation techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of program obfuscation by modifying control-flow graphs (CFGs) to prevent information leakage, proposing a method to rewrite code into functionally equivalent versions with radically different CFGs.
One of the big challenges in program obfuscation consists in modifying not only the program's straight-line code (SLC) but also the program's control flow graph (CFG). Indeed, if only SLC is modified, the program's CFG can be extracted and analyzed. Usually, the CFG leaks a considerable amount of information on the program's structure. In this work we propose a method allowing to re-write a code P into a functionally equivalent code P' such that CFG{P} and CFG{P'} are radically different.