Three Methods of Control Flow Obfuscation on Java Software

Abstract

A defense against reverse engineering is obfuscation, a process that renders software unintelligible but still functional. Our goal is to let all known decompilation techniques fail to decompile Java programs and lower the re-engineering level to assembly language (bytecode). We design three new obfuscation methods for protecting Java code. Our new designed techniques are named as “destroying basic block obfuscation”, “replacing goto obfuscation” and “intersecting loop obfuscation”. We use 16 different available decompliers to examine and compare our obfuscations. As the result, both the “replacing goto obfuscation” and the “intersecting loop obfuscation” could succeed to defeat all the decompilers.