A Novel Software Protection Approach for Code Obfuscation to Enhance Software Security

Over the past few decades ago, software developers analyzed robustly several forms of software protection against illegal copying or piracy. With the expansion in digital technology, the risk of illegal copying of software also amplifies. The increasing piracy rate has posed a serious threat to software developers leading to the development of various software protection techniques. However, various techniques have been proposed for copyright protection such as software watermarking, obfuscation, tamper-proofing and diversity. The code transformation (obfuscation) is a method of transforming a program into a form which is more complicated for an adversary to understand or change the original code from an illegitimate process of reverse engineering. None of the current code obfuscation approaches provide resistance from reverse engineering attacks. The reverse engineering threat occurs due to the unconfined software code to the user. Malicious reverse engineering of software codes can be harder by exertion of code transformation on software programs. To address this, we acquaint a peculiar code transformation approach for software protection. The proposed approach is used semantically equivalent to code clone within the source code to protect logical part of program text. We have successfully implement our approach using open source java project Gantt project system and open source java obfuscator's tools. In this paper, we present our approach and demonstrate it with an illustration. The intent of this method is to prevent static analysis attack and make dynamic attack compact for an adversary. This makes it worthwhile against reverse engineering attacks.