Which term describes disguising or hiding code to make reverse engineering more difficult?

Which term describes disguising or hiding code to make reverse engineering more difficult?

• A. Obfuscation
• B. Steganography
• C. Tokenization
• D. Data masking

Answer: (A)

Obfuscation disguises code to make reverse engineering more difficult. It alters the program’s structure and identifiers so its logic is harder to follow, without changing what the program does. Techniques include renaming variables to meaningless tokens, adding misleading or opaque conditions, and transforming control flow to be less intuitive. The aim is to raise the effort required to understand or tamper with the code, which can deter casual analysis and protect intellectual property. Steganography hides information inside other data, such as embedding a secret message in an image or audio file, and isn’t about making code harder to analyze. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive placeholders for processing, not to obscure executable logic. Data masking hides or redacts data values, typically in datasets, not to obstruct reverse engineering of software. So obfuscation is the term that best describes disguising code to complicate reverse engineering.

Obfuscation disguises code to make reverse engineering more difficult. It alters the program’s structure and identifiers so its logic is harder to follow, without changing what the program does. Techniques include renaming variables to meaningless tokens, adding misleading or opaque conditions, and transforming control flow to be less intuitive. The aim is to raise the effort required to understand or tamper with the code, which can deter casual analysis and protect intellectual property.

Steganography hides information inside other data, such as embedding a secret message in an image or audio file, and isn’t about making code harder to analyze. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive placeholders for processing, not to obscure executable logic. Data masking hides or redacts data values, typically in datasets, not to obstruct reverse engineering of software. So obfuscation is the term that best describes disguising code to complicate reverse engineering.