Generating functionally equivalent programs having non-isomorphic control-flow graphs

Abstract

One of the big challenges in program obfuscation consists in modifying not only the program’s straight-line code (SLC) but also the program’s control flow graph (CFG). Indeed, if only SLC is modified, the program’s CFG can be extracted and analyzed. Usually, the CFG leaks a considerable amount of information on the program’s structure. In this work we propose a method allowing to re-write a code P into a functionally equivalent code P′ such that CFG(P) and CFG(P′) are radically different.