Software disengineering: Program hiding architecture and experiments

Abstract

Protecting software is becoming important in the context of modern Internet technologies; often such protection efforts are kept as trade secrets. In this paper, we take a step toward understanding such protection mechanisms and their impact on performance and security. We present a program hiding architecture that utilizes an automatic hiding tool. The hiding tool generates programs that are resistant to reverse engineering by applying software transformations. Our approach protects against the learning of inner workings (and subsequently tampering) of executables in environments that lack appropriate hardware support and where programs may contain certain private knowledge components (proprietary algorithms). We designed and implemented a prototype of a hiding tool for Tcl. We studied the effect of transformations on the execution time of Tcl scripts and suggest a security checking experimentation as well.