Code obfuscation, which is an effective program transformation, can obscure the program understanding and thus protect the program from reverse engineering. The proving of its efficiency is the prime problem of the research, which currently takes no account of the semantic information. This paper constructs a semantic-based comparable framework measuring obfuscation efficiency, which not only prove efficiency under the limited environment of static analysis, but also can establish the formal foundation for obfuscation efficiency comparison. The last part of the paper illustrates how the framework can be applied to measure the efficiency of code obfuscation with an instantiation.
abstract interpretation; program transformation; program analysis; code obfuscation