Cloud Protection by Obfuscation: Techniques and Metrics

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of software protection based on the concept of security by obscurity, code obfuscation is now a hot topic in the field of digital right management, protecting against reverse engineering and tampering. Obfuscation comes in handy in situations where depending on cryptographic techniques is not enough, this is typical in remote execution situations where the software is executed on an unforeseen exposed hostile environment, such as the new computing platforms: cloud-computing paradigm and smartphones. Obfuscation is popular among malware and virus developers but also game developers and industrials who need to protect their intellectual property. They use it to conceal the operation of their code while executing in an uncontrolled environment. In this paper, we discuss the same concepts but for the different purpose of cloud security. We explore the state-of-the art in techniques and algorithms for software obfuscation. We also address how to assess the strength of these techniques via a concrete set of metrics.