text: Protecting source code against reverse engineering and theft is an important problem. The goal is to carry out computations using confidential algorithms on an untrusted party while ensuring confidentiality of algorithms. This problem has been addressed for Boolean circuits known as circuit privacy'. Circuits corresponding to real-world programs are impractical. Well-known obfuscation techniques are highly practicable, but provide only limited security, e.g., no piracy protection. In this work, we modify source code yielding programs with adjustable performance and security guarantees ranging from indistinguishability obfuscators to (non-secure) ordinary obfuscation. The idea is to artificially generate misleading' statements. Their results are combined with the outcome of a confidential statement using encrypted . Thus, an attacker must guess' the encrypted selector variables to disguise the confidential source code. We evaluated our method using more than ten programmers as well as pattern mining across open source code repositories to gain insights of (micro-)coding patterns that are relevant for generating misleading statements. The evaluation reveals that our approach is effective in that it successfully preserves source code confidentiality.
  @cite_11: Motivated by the problem of protecting cryptographic hardware, we continue the investigation of private circuits initiated in [16]. In this work, our aim is to construct circuits that should protect the secrecy of their internal state against an adversary who may modify the values of an unbounded number of wires, anywhere in the circuit. In contrast, all previous works on protecting cryptographic hardware relied on an assumption that some portion of the circuit must remain completely free from tampering. We obtain the first feasibility results for such private circuits. Our main result is an efficient transformation of a circuit C, realizing an arbitrary (reactive) functionality, into a private circuit C′ realizing the same functionality. The transformed circuit can successfully detect any serious tampering and erase all data in the memory. In terms of the information available to the adversary, even in the presence of an unbounded number of adaptive wire faults, the circuit C′ emulates a black-box access to C.
summary: Keeping the circuit private while changing any wire value in the circuit has also been investigated @cite_11 . An attack can be detected and data can then be erased.