Obfuscation techniques for Java source code

Abstract

Nowadays, software piracy becomes one of the headaches of any software companies. There are many techniques to protect a software from being copy, reverse-engineered or modified before delivering to user. Some of them can be listed out such as watermarking, embedding decryption keys in hardware, tamper-proofing, fingerprint code, virtual machine… Obfuscation is a very cheap and can be conducted at multiple levels of complexity and in multiple stages of a program. This technique secures the software by making it obscure and difficult for hackers to understand the function of codes and reverse-engineer.. This project focuses on obfuscation techniques at the highest level of a program: source code, namely variable and class renaming, array restructuring, including array splitting, array merging, array folding and array flattening. The project uses Java programming language and Java Development Tools in Plug-in environment of Eclipse.