Metricsbased evaluation of slicing obfuscations

An obfuscation aims to transform a program, without af-fecting its functionality, so that some secret data within the program can be hidden for as long as possible from an ad-versary armed with reverse engineering tools. Slicing is a reverse engineering technique which produces a subset of a program that is dependent on a particular program point and is used to aid in program comprehension. Thus slicing could be used as a way of attacking obfuscated programs. In this contribution, we highlight a few obfuscating transforms that were proposed in an earlier publication for making attacks difficult to mount using slicers and then il-lustrate an experimental design to evaluate the strength of these transforms with respect to well defined slicing metrics