Rachael Little, Dongpeng Xu (University of New Hampshire)

Software obfuscation is a form of code protection designed to hide the inner workings of a program from reverse engineering and analysis. Mixed Boolean Arithmetic (MBA) is one popular form that obscures simple arithmetic expressions via transformation to more complex equations involving both boolean and arithmetic operations. Most prior works focused on developing strong MBA at the source code or expression level; however, how many of them are resilient against compiler optimizations still remain unknown. In this work, we carefully inspect the strength of MBA obfuscation after various compiler optimizations. We embed MBA expressions from several popular datasets into C programs and examine how they appear post-compilation using the compilers GCC, Clang, and MSVC. Surprisingly, we discover a notable trend of reduction in MBA size and complexity after compiler optimization. We report our findings and discuss how MBA expressions are impacted by compiler optimizations.

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Shang Ma (University of Notre Dame), Chaoran Chen (University of Notre Dame), Shao Yang (Case Western Reserve University), Shifu Hou (University of Notre Dame), Toby Jia-Jun Li (University of Notre Dame), Xusheng Xiao (Arizona State University), Tao Xie (Peking University), Yanfang Ye (University of Notre Dame)

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Yuqing Yang (The Ohio State University), Yue Zhang (Drexel University), Zhiqiang Lin (The Ohio State University)

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Haoqiang Wang, Yiwei Fang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Indiana University Bloomington), Yichen Liu (Indiana University Bloomington), Ze Jin (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Indiana University Bloomington), Emma Delph…

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