Implementation of an Obfuscation Tool for C/C plus plus Source Code Protection on the XScale Architecture

Obfuscation is one of the most effective methods to protect software against malicious reverse engineering intentionally making the code more complex and confusing. In this paper, we implement and evaluate an obfuscation tool, or obfuscator for protecting the intellectual property of C/C++ source code. That is, this paper presents an implementation of a code obfuscator, a tool which transforms a C/C++ source program into an equivalent one that is much harder to understand. We have used the ANTRL parser generator for parsing C/C++ programs, and applied some obfuscation algorithms. Performance analysis is conducted by executing two obfuscated programs on the XScale architecture to establish the relationship between the complexity and the performance of each program. When the obfuscated source code has been compared with the original source code, it has enough effectiveness in terms of potency and resilience though it incurs some run-time overhead.