JConstHide: A Framework for Java Source Code Constant Hiding

Abstract: Software obfuscation or obscuring a software is an approach to defeat the practice of reverse engineering a software for using its functionality illegally in the development of another software. Java applications are more amenable to reverse engineering and re-engineering attacks through methods such as decompilation because Java class files store the program in a semi complied form called byte codes. The existing obfuscation systems obfuscate the Java class files. Obfuscated source code produce obfuscated byte codes and hence two level obfuscation (source code and byte code level) of the program makes it more resilient to reverse engineering attacks . But source code obfuscation is much more difficult due to richer set of programming constructs and the scope of the different variables used in the program and only very little progress has been made on this front. We in this paper are proposing a framework named JConstHide for hiding constants, especially integers in the java source codes, to defeat reverse engineering through decompilation. To the best of our knowledge, no data hiding software are available for java source code constant hiding.