Abstract
With the advent of the Cloud Computing (CC) paradigm and the explosion of new Web Services proposed over the Internet (such as Google Office Apps, Dropbox or Doodle just to cite a few of them), the protection of the programs at the heart of these services becomes more and more crucial, especially for the companies making business on top of these services. In parallel, the overwhelming majority of modern websites use the JavaScript programming language as all modern web browsers - either on desktops, game consoles, tablets or smart phones - include JavaScript interpreters making it the most ubiquitous programming language in history. Thus, JavaScript is the core technology of most web services. In this context, this article focuses on novel obfuscation techniques to protect JavaScript program contents.
Informally, the goal of obfuscation is to make a program ”unintelligible” without altering its functionality, thus preventing reverse-engineering on the program. However, this approach hardly caught attention from the research community after stand-alone obfuscation for arbitrary programs has been proven impossible in 2001. Here we would like to renew this interest with the proposal of JShadObf, an obfuscation framework based on evolutionary heuristics designed to optimize for a given input JavaScript program, the sequence of transformations that should be applied to the source code to improve its obfuscation capacity. Measuring this capacity is based on the combination of several metrics optimized simultaneously withMulti-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). Whereas our approach cannot pretend to offer an absolute protection, the objective remains to protect the target program for a sufficiently long period of time. The experiment results initially conducted on a pedagogical example then on JQuery - the most popular and widely used JavaScript library - outperform existing solutions. It demonstrates the validity of the approach and its concrete usage in reference codes used worldwide.
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Bertholon, B., Varrette, S., Bouvry, P. (2013). JShadObf: A JavaScript Obfuscator Based on Multi-Objective Optimization Algorithms. In: Lopez, J., Huang, X., Sandhu, R. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7873. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38631-2_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38631-2_25
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