Design and Evaluation of the De-obfuscation Method against the Identifier Renaming Methods

Abstract

To protect the software from cracking, the obfuscation methods were proposed. An obfuscation method is to change programs hard to understand by preserving input/output specification. Various obfuscation methods are proposed [2–4], and are implemented to tools, such as Dash-O2, ProGuard3, and etc. In particular, the Identifier Renaming Method (IRM) is widely used, which changes the identifiers in the programs to meaningless names. Because it is easy to implement and to understand the approach [5,6]. However, IRM did not sufficiently discuss the tolerance against attacks, and strength of the protection. Because the relationships between the meanings of identifiers and strength of the protection are not clear.