A Tool for Teaching Reverse Engineering

Tigress is a freely available source-to-source, C language code obfuscator. The tool allows users to obfuscate existing programs or programs randomly generated by Tigress itself. Tigress is highly flexible, providing a large number of standard obfuscating code transformations, and many variants of each transformation. Tigress may be used in many contexts, but in this paper we describe its use in teaching code reverse engineering techniques. In order to make Tigress easily available and usable to educators and students, we have integrated Tigress into a web application. In addition to directly benefiting education, this new web application offers unique ways to advance research on code obfuscation and reverse engineering.