Generalising the array split obfuscation
An obfuscation is a behaviour-preserving program transformation whose aim is to make a program harder to understand. Obfuscations are mainly applied to make reverse engineering of object-oriented programs more difficult. In this paper, we propose a fresh approach by obfuscating abstract data-types allowing us to develop structure-dependent obfuscations that would otherwise (traditionally) not be available. We regard obfuscation as data refinement enabling us to produce equations for proving correctness. We model the data-type operations as functional programs making our proofs easy to construct. We show how we can generalise an imperative obfuscation  an array split  so that we can apply it to abstract data-types and we give specific examples for lists and matrices. We develop a theorem which allows us, under certain conditions, to produce obfuscated operations directly. Our approach also allows us to produce random obfuscations and we give an example for our list data-type.
generalising obfuscation abstract data-types functional programming