Surreptitious Software

4. Code Obfuscation

Code obfuscation is both the most important and the most elusive of the software protection techniques we discuss in this book. Elusive because it has proven hard to pin down exactly what obfuscation is, to devise practically useful algorithms, and to evaluate the quality of these algorithms, and important because if we could agree on definitions and devise strong algorithms, we would have a solution to many practical problems in security and cryptography.

Our discussion of code obfuscation will spread over three chapters. In this chapter, you will learn about some of the history of code obfuscation and the algorithms that have been proposed in the literature that are used in practice. In Chapter 5 (Obfuscation Theory), we ...