Lambda obfuscation

Abstract

With the rise of increasingly advanced reverse engineering technique, especially more scalable symbolic execution tools, software obfuscation faces great challenges. Branch conditions contain important control flow logic of a program. Adversaries can use powerful program analysis tools to collect sensitive program properties and recover a program’s internal logic, stealing intellectual properties from the original owner. In this paper, we propose a novel control obfuscation technique that uses lambda calculus to hide the original computation semantics and makes the original program more obscure to understand and reverse engineer. Our obfuscator replaces the conditional instructions with lambda calculus function calls that simulate the same behavior with a more complicated execution model. Our experiment result shows that our obfuscation method can protect sensitive branch conditions from state-of-the-art symbolic execution techniques, with only modest overhead.