Unveiling and Veiling Information in Programs

In this extended abstract we survey the most recent developments in code obfuscation and protection from a programming languages perspective. Starting from known impossibility results on universal and general purpose code obfuscation, we show that provably secure obfuscation can be achieved by constraining the attack model. This corresponds to associate attacks with suitable forms of interpretation. In this context it is always possible to systematically making code obscure, making this interpretation failing in extracting (attacking) code. The code transformation can itself be specified as the specialization of a distorted interpreter.

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