Paper 2011/497

Can a Program Reverse-Engineer Itself?

Antoine Amarilli and David Naccache and Pablo Rauzy and Emil Simion

Abstract

Shape-memory alloys are metal pieces that "remember" their original cold-forged shapes and return to the pre-deformed shape after heating. In this work we construct a software analogous of shape-memory alloys: programs whose code resists obfuscation. We show how to pour arbitrary functions into protective envelops that allow recovering the functions' {\sl exact initial code} after obfuscation. We explicit the theoretical foundations of our method and provide a concrete implementation in Scheme.