Identifying the applied obfuscation method towards de-obfuscation

Recently, to prevent cracking, the various protection methods have been proposed. One of the protection methods is the obfuscation method. Obfuscation method changes the program into hard to understand for hiding secret information in the program. On the other hand, de-obfuscation is an interesting research topic for protecting the software. Since, though vulnerable protection methods are dangerous, measuring the robustness of the method was not discussed. In this paper, we tackle to identify the applied obfuscation methods towards de-obfuscation. To perform de-obfuscation requires a suitable method for each obfuscation method. For this, we obfuscated programs by two practical tools and three algorithms from one academic tool. Then, we analyzed the programs and extracted characteristics from them based on opcodes. By using the proposed method, we could identify the applied obfuscation method.