Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

• Program: PHC

• Title: Code obfuscation through JIT compilation

• Inria principal investigator: Erven ROHOU

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Egypt-Japan University for Science and Technology (Egypt)

• Duration: Jan 2013 - Dec 2013

• This project leverages JIT compilation to make software tamper-proof. The idea is to constantly generate different versions of an application, even while it runs, to make reverse engineering much more complex. A strong random number generator guarantees that generated code is not reproducible – though the semantics is the same. In the course of the project, we also studied new forms of On-Stack-Replacement that let us recompile code even from the middle of a function. Finally, we studied how threads can be exploited to generate new forms of obfuscation, leveraging the fact that parallelism is error-prone, and difficult to debug and reverse-engineer.