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Software DisEngineering: Program Hiding Architecture and Experiments

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Information Hiding (IH 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1768))

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Abstract

Protecting software is becoming important in the context of modern Internet technologies; often such protection efforts are kept as trade secrets. In this paper, we take a step toward understanding such protection mechanisms and their impact on performance and security. We present a program hiding architecture that utilizes an automatic hiding tool. The hiding tool generates programs that are resistant to reverse engineering by applying software transformations. Our approach protects against the learning of inner workings (and subsequently tampering) of executables in environments that lack appropriate hardware support and where programs may contain certain private knowledge components (proprietary algorithms). We designed and implemented a prototype of a hiding tool for Tcl. We studied the effect of transformations on the execution time of Tcl scripts and suggest a security checking experimentation as well.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9256688 and the NY State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer and Information Science Department, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY, USA

    Enriquillo Valdez

  2. CertCo Inc., New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

Authors
  1. Enriquillo Valdez
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  2. Moti Yung
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Andreas Pfitzmann

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Valdez, E., Yung, M. (2000). Software DisEngineering: Program Hiding Architecture and Experiments. In: Pfitzmann, A. (eds) Information Hiding. IH 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1768. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10719724_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10719724_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67182-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46514-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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