Obfuscation as Instruction Decorrelation

Abstract: Obfuscation of computer programs has historically been approached either as a practical but \textit{ad hoc} craft to make reverse engineering subjectively difficult, or as a sound theoretical investigation unfortunately detached from the numerous existing constraints of engineering practical systems. In this paper, we propose \textit{instruction decorrelation} as a new approach that makes the instructions of a set of real-world programs appear independent from one another. We contribute: a formal definition of \textit{instruction independence} with multiple instantiations for various aspects of programs; a combination of program transformations that meet the corresponding instances of instruction independence against an honest-but-curious adversary, specifically random interleaving and memory access obfuscation; and an implementation of an interpreter that uses a trusted execution environment (TEE) only to perform memory address translation and memory shuffling, leaving instructions execution outside the TEE. These first steps highlight the practicality of our approach. Combined with additional techniques to protect the content of memory and to hopefully lower the requirements on TEEs, this work could potentially lead to more secure obfuscation techniques that could execute on commonly available hardware.