Measuring Software Obfuscation Quality–A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Software obfuscation techniques are increasingly being used to prevent attackers from exploiting security flaws and launching successful attacks. With research on software obfuscation techniques rapidly growing, many software obfuscation techniques with varying quality and strength have been proposed in the literature. However, the literature on obfuscation techniques has not yet been coherently collated and reviewed. This research paper aims to present an overview of state-of-the-art software obfuscation techniques, focusing on quality and strength. A systematic analysis and synthesis of literature published between 2010 and April 2021 has been performed to identify the common measures to quantify obfuscation and their measures, the publication venue, and the home country of the researchers. We have identified the obfuscation quality attributes, such as potency, resilience, cost, stealth, and similarity, that are the most widely used metrics to evaluate the quality of obfuscation techniques. In addition, different measures have been used to quantify these qualities, such as complexity (to measure potency), human effort (to measure resilience), efficiency (to estimate cost), and multiclass performance metrics, distance measures, and matching method (to quantify similarity). These measures were then categorized into sub-measures. The literature lacks research in the following two areas: empirical research using a case study strategy, i.e., real-world datasets, and measurements of obfuscation stealth. Researchers did not address stealth as clearly as they addressed potency, cost, and similarity.

Keywords

• Software obfuscation
• obfuscation quality
• obfuscation measure
• malware detection
• systematic literature review