Algorithmic Information Theory for Obfuscation Security

Rabih Mohsen; Alexandre  Miranda Pinto

The full text of this paper is only available to INSTICC members.

Algorithmic Information Theory for Obfuscation Security

Author(s)

Rabih Mohsen

- Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Alexandre Miranda Pinto

- Royal Holloway University of London and Instituto Universit´ario da Maia, United Kingdom

Keywords

Code Obfuscation, Kolmogorov Complexity, Intellectual Property Protection.

Abstract

The main problem in designing effective code obfuscation is to guarantee security. State of the art obfuscation techniques rely on an unproven concept of security, and therefore are not regarded as provably secure. In this paper, we undertake a theoretical investigation of code obfuscation security based on Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic mutual information. We introduce a new definition of code obfuscation that requires the algorithmic mutual information between a code and its obfuscated version to be minimal, allowing for controlled amount of information to be leaked to an adversary. We argue that our definition avoids the impossibility results of Barak et al. and is more advantageous then obfuscation indistinguishability definition in the sense it is more intuitive, and is algorithmic rather than probabilistic.

Event

International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2015)

Topics

Information Hiding

Intellectual Property Protection

Software Security

Formal Methods for Security