Protecting JavaScript Apps from Code Analysis
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Abstract
Apps written in JavaScript are an easy target for reverse engineering attacks, e.g. to steal the intellectual property or to create a clone of an app. Unprotected JavaScript apps even contain high level information such as developer comments, if those were not explicitly stripped. This fact becomes more and more important with the increasing popularity of JavaScript as language of choice for both web development and hybrid mobile apps. In this paper, we present a novel JavaScript obfuscator based on the Google Closure Compiler, which transforms readable JavaScript source code into a representation much harder to analyze for adversaries. We evaluate this obfuscator regarding its performance impact and its semantics-preserving property.
References
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Michael Bolin. 2010. Closure: the definitive guide (1. ed ed.). O'Reilly, Sebastopol, Calif.
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Christian Collberg and Jasvir Nagra. 2010. Surreptitious software: obfuscation, watermarking, and tamperproofing forsoftware protection. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
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Christian Collberg, Clark Thomborson, and Douglas Low. 1997. A taxonomy of obfuscating transformations. Technical Report. Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, New Zealand.
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David Flanagan. 2011. JavaScript: the definitive guide (6th ed ed.). O'Reilly, Beijing; Sebastopol, CA.
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Kolisar. 2008. WhiteSpace: A Different Approach to JavaScript Obfuscation. (2008). DEFCON 16.
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Sebastian Schrittwieser, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Johannes Kinder, Georg Merzdovnik, and Edgar Weippl. 2015. Protecting Software through Obfuscation: Can It Keep Pace with Progress in Code Analysis? Comput. Surveys (2015), 1--40.
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Index Terms
- Protecting JavaScript Apps from Code Analysis
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June 2017
53 pages
ISBN:9781450352710
DOI:10.1145/3099012
Copyright © 2017 ACM.
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 19 June 2017
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- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
- The research leading to these results was supported by the Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts as part of the FORSEC research association.
Conference
SHCIS '17
SHCIS '17: Workshop on Security in Highly Connected IT Systems
June 19 - 22, 2017
Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Acceptance Rates
SHCIS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 11 submissions, 73%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 8 of 11 submissions, 73%
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