Java obfuscation with a theoretical basis for building secure mobile agents

Abstract

In this paper we propose novel techniques to obfuscate Java programs for developing secure mobile agent systems. Our obfuscation techniques take advantage of polymorphism and exception mechanism of object-oriented languages and can drastically reduce the precision of points-to analysis of the programs. We show that determining precise points-to analysis in obfuscated programs is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, in this paper we present some empirical experiments, whereby we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.