Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles: Securing Java-Based Mobile Agents through Byte Code Obfuscation Techniques

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles

Securing Java-Based Mobile Agents through Byte Code Obfuscation Techniques
by Syed Waqar Shah, P.Nixon, R.I. Ferguson, Syed Riaz ul Hassnain, M. Naeem Arbab, Laiq Khan
in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Multitopic Conference, December 2006, pp. 305-308

After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles.

This paper duplicated extensive amounts of text from the paper cited below. The original text was copied without attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper title) and without permission. P. Nixon and R.I. Ferguson were added to the list of authors without any knowledge of the paper, and therefore were not responsible for the misconduct

Due to the nature of this violation, reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper, and future references should be made to the following article:

Preventing Reverse Engineering Threat in Java Using Byte Code Obfuscation Techniques
by Jan M. Memon, Shams-ul-Arfeen, Asghar Mughal, Faisal Memon
in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Emerging Technologies, November 2006, pp. 689-694


Mobile agents have the ability to relocate computation and then carry communication with their peers locally. The design and implementation of mechanism to relocate computations requires a careful assessment of security issues. If these issues are not addressed properly, mobile agent technology cannot be used to implement real-world applications. To address such issues this paper proposes two code obfuscation techniques [1] for Java-based mobile agents that are compiled into a platform independent byte code format. These techniques will involve applying obfuscating transformations to the mobile agent's byte code in order to protect them against malicious attacks. Consequently these techniques will prevent automatic software analysis tools, De-compilers, from generating correct source code by introducing syntax and semantic errors in the generated source code. The proposed techniques will be applied on sample mobile agent's class files to examine the effectiveness of the techniques in impeding reverse engineering. After obtaining the results, we will reveal the erroneous codes generated by the tested de-compilers.