Context: Diversification and obfuscation are promising techniques for securing software and
protecting computers from harmful malware. The goal of these techniques is not removing …

Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several
studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed …

Code obfuscation is widely used by software developers to protect intellectual property, and
malware writers to hamper program analysis. However, there seems to be little work on …

Copying and pasting of source code is a common activity in software engineering. Often, the
code is not copied as it is and it may be modified for various purposes; eg refactoring, bug …

Software developers spend a great deal of time reading and understanding code that is
poorly-documented, written by other developers, or developed using differing styles. During …

In the past few years, malware classification techniques have shifted from shallow traditional
machine learning models to deeper neural network architectures. The main benefit of some …

Software piracy is an important concern for application developers. Such concerns are
especially relevant in mobile application development, where piracy rates can approach …

Context: code obfuscation is intended to obstruct code understanding and, eventually, to
delay malicious code changes and ultimately render it uneconomical. Although code …

Developers expend significant effort on reviewing source code changes. Hence, the
comprehensibility of code changes directly affects development productivity. Our prior study …

Obfuscation techniques are a general category of software protections widely adopted to
prevent malicious tampering of the code by making applications more difficult to understand …