Metrics-based Evaluation of Slicing Obfuscations

An obfuscation aims to transform a program, without affecting its functionality, so that some secret data within the program can be hidden for as long as possible from an adversary armed with reverse engineering tools. Slicing is a reverse engineering technique which produces a subset of a program that is dependent on a particular program point and is used to aid in program comprehension. Thus slicing could be used as a way of attacking obfuscated programs. In this contribution, we highlight a few obfuscating transforms that were proposed in an earlier publication for making attacks difficult to mount using slicers and then illustrate an experimental design to evaluate the strength of these transforms with respect to well defined slicing metrics.