Program Obfuscation

The goal of program obfuscation is to provably complicate the task of reverse engineering.

Owners of source code wish to make it as hard as possible for others to extract information from their binaries - information which may reveal trade secrets, allow undesirable modifications, or enable software piracy.

Obfuscation is typically seen as a problem relating to programming languages or compilers. The connection to cryptography is not entirely clear and was only first noticed in 2000. Since then, a few papers have been published every year on the subject.