This article discusses architecture support for 3D obfuscation. Abstract: Software obfuscation is defined as a transformation of a program P into T(P) such that the whitebox and blackbox behaviors of T(P) are computationally indistinguishable. However, robust obfuscation is impossible to achieve with the existing software only solutions. This results from the power of the adversary model in DRM which is significantly more than in the traditional security scenarios. The adversary has complete control of the computing node - supervisory privileges along with the full physical as well as architectural object observational capabilities. In essence, this makes the operating system (or any other layer around the architecture) untrustworthy. Thus the trust has to be provided by the underlying architecture. In this paper, the authors develop an architecture to support 3-D obfuscation through the use of well known cryptographic methods. The three dimensional obfuscation hides the address sequencing, the contents associated with an address, and the temporal reuse of address sequences such as in loops (or the second order address sequencing). The software is kept as an obfuscated file system image statically. Moreover, its execution traces are also dynamically obfuscated along all the three dimensions of address sequencing, contents and second order address sequencing. Such an obfuscation makes it infinitesimally likely that good tampering points can be detected. This in turn provides with a very good degree of tamper resistance. With the use of already known software distribution model of ABYSS and XOM, the authors can also ensure copy protection. This results in a complete DRM architecture to provide both copy protection and IP protection.

© 2006 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from [Mahadevan Gomathisankaran and Akhilesh Tyagi, Architecture Support for 3D Obfuscation, IEEE Transactions on Computers, May 2006].

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17 p.

• English

• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2006.68
• ARK: ark:/67531/metadc132973