Code Obfuscation Against Abstract Model Checking Attacks.

Code protection technologies require anti reverse engineering transformations to obfuscate programs in such a way that tools and methods for program analysis become ineffective. We introduce the concept of model deformation inducing an effective code obfuscation against attacks performed by abstract model checking. This means complicating the model in such a way a high number of spurious traces are generated in any formal verification of the property to disclose about the system under attack. We transform the program model in order to make the removal of spurious counterexamples by abstraction refinement maximally inefficient. A measure of the quality of the obfuscation obtained by model deformation is given together with a corresponding best obfuscation strategy for abstract model checking based on partition refinement.