Arithmetic Obfuscation: What is Mobile Application Protection?

[@Muzzino]

Doesn't that increase processing requirements?

[@Guardsquare]

That's a valid question from a developer's perspective and we have already taken steps to address it, as we believe that security measures do not have to compromise app performance. To learn more, we suggest checking out a recent blog post we wrote on the topic: www.guardsquare.com/blog/balancing-performance-and-security-with-android-baseline-profiles-and-dexguard

[@nyny]

ChatGPT probably rendering this obsolete

[@Guardsquare]

Could you expand on how you think ChatGPT could make obfuscation obsolete? Would you use it to add obfuscation to your code? Or use it to circumvent obfuscated code?

[@nyny]

​@@Guardsquare If the obfuscation is towards creating a cognitive barrier to overcome, so that if they reverse engineered it they would find a convoluted and hard to understand pile of code, one could provide the obfuscated code and ask it to refactor it, or to describe what is happening in detail. That things were spaghettified or some mathy calculations happened would be resolved quite quickly, since a person wouldn't need to sit down and detangle and map out what's going on.

[@Guardsquare]

Thank you for responding. Good reason to use multi-layered, polymorphic solutions that make obfuscation even more complex, and even more needed. A good resource is: www.guardsquare.com/blog/compiler-based-mobile-app-security-vs-app-shielding

[@nyny]

@@Guardsquare Good luck.I don't know how far one would be able to get now with a decompiler / stack tracing / AI approach, but I'd surmise the clock is ticking (as it always is, regarding any methods of security)