The Obfuscation Of Software Data Type Information

With the development of software reverse engineering, more and more illegal activities to software have taken place. By knowing the bugs in software, the attacker can launch the vulnerability, attacks; In addition, by cracking the key or encryption methods, the attacker can be given the unauthorized usage of the programs;,Even worse, with the reverse engineering techniques, piracy and copy of the program becomes troublesome problems for the software vendors., All those security attacks,such as copyright theft of the applications and video records, the leakage of the privacy of the customer, and eavesdropping of the network package, are based on reverse engineering. As such, it’s urgent and important that researches on development of the anti-reverse engineering techniques to improve the security of the program, and this security topic attracts the researcher’s attention these days.Software code protection is a hot research technology in the field of software security. This kind of technology is a way to prevent software reverse engineering, by modifying binary code of the executable file to make reverse engineering tools ineffective. Software code protection includes software encryption, software diversity (polymorphic and metamorphic), watermarking, code obfuscation and so on, while in the research fields of software code obfuscation includes the layout obfuscation, the software control flow obfuscation, data obfuscation, address randomization and so on.This paper mainly focuses on the technology of data type obfuscation in data obfuscation area. By demonstrating the applications in intellectual property protection, software vulnerabilities defense, we illustrate data type obfuscation is very important in data obfuscation and it has played an important role in software protection. Nevertheless there is few relevant study on this field at present. Our main propose is trying to find out general data type reversing model by studying the state-of-the-art data type reversing methods and constructing a model of data type obfuscation to prevent the type reverse engineering. Our paper makes the following contributions: first, this paper analyzes the code obfuscation technology in all aspects and points out the limitation of existing data type obfuscation, which still needs further to be improved. Secondly, by analyzing a lot of reverse engineering tools, we summarize the main methods of data type reversing and construct data type reversing model. Thirdly, we further construct a data type obfuscation model based on the data type reversing modeling process. Last but not the least, we also put forward some particular enlightening rules and methods, testify that these models are reasonable by a great deal of experiments, and evaluate the effect of the model of type obfuscation. Experimental results show that our data type obfuscation tool can successfully defend the existing popular type reverse engineering tool (e.g., Boomerange, Catchconv) and achieve a little performance overhead.