Vivek Balachandran¹, Sabu Emmanuel² and Ng Wee Keong³, ¹Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, ²Kuwait University, Kuwait and ³Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Software reverse engineering is an active threat against software programs. One of the popular techniques used to make software reverse engineering harder is obfuscation. Among various control flow obfuscations methods proposed in the last decade there is a lack of inter-functional control flow obfuscation techniques. In this paper we propose an inter-functional control flow obfuscation by manipulating return instructions. In our proposed method each function is split into different units, with each unit ending with a return instruction. The linear order in which functions appear in the program is obscured by shuffling these units there by creating an inter-functional control flow obfuscation. Experimental results show that the algorithm performs well against automated reverse engineering attacks.

Software protection, Code obfuscation, Reverse engineering