S.K. Udupa, S.K. Debray, M. Madou, "Deobfuscation: Reverse Engineering Obfuscated Code," 12th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, pp. 45- 54, IEEE, November 2005.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2005.13


@inproceedings{udupa05deobfuscation, 
    author  = "Udupa, Sharath and Debray, Saumya and Madou, Matias", 
    title  = "Deobfuscation: Reverse Engineering Obfuscated Code", 
    booktitle  = "Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Reverse
Engineering", 
    year  = "2005", 
    publisher  = "IEEE Computer Society", 
}  



Abstract: In recent years, code obfuscation has attracted attention as a low
cost approach to improving software security by making it difficult for
attackers to understand the inner workings of proprietary software systems.
This paper examines techniques for automatic de-obfuscation of obfuscated
programs, as a step towards reverse engineering such programs. Our results
indicate that much of the effects of code obfuscation, designed to increase
the difficulty of static analyses, can be defeated using simple combinations
of straightforward static and dynamic analyses. Our results have
applications to both software engineering and software security. In the
context of software engineering, we show how dynamic analyses can be used to
enhance reverse engineering, even for code that has been designed to be
difficult to reverse engineer. For software security, our results serve as
an attack model for code obfuscators, and can help with the development of
obfuscation techniques that are more resilient to straightforward reverse
engineering.

URL:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/iel5/10475/33222/01566145.
pdf?isnumber=33222&prod=STD&arnumber=1566145&arnumber=1566145&arSt=+45&ared=
+54&arAuthor=+Udupa%2C+S.K.%3B++Debray%2C+S.K.%3B++Madou%2C+M.