Copyright (c) 2022, Tangent65536. All rights reserved.
MATLAB(R) is the property of The MathWorks, Inc.
We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by,
or in any way officially connected with The MathWorks, Inc.
The main goal of this tool is to provide a more robust way to obfuscate Matlab codes. As it turns out, the official tools provided in the Matlab Compiler SDK, pcode and mcc, do not actually compile or even obfuscate the input codes. Alternatively, mcc only encrypts the code using a 256-bit AES key, while pcode is just a tool to encode input code into a specific format before applying a trivial cyclic XOR operation. None of them remove key information such as variable names to further protect the packaged codes. Unfortunately, both mcc and pcode has been successfully reverse-engineered and one can find open-source tools online to do the job. Hence, relying on merely the official SDK is not a secure way to protect one's codes.
Luckily, multiple techniques have been developed by researchers and programmers to transform original source code into hardly readable forms. One of them is control flow flattening. The key concept is to turn input code into a mess by abusing branching/jumping statements, such as goto or switch/case to reproduce the behavior flow. Such transformation removes all the nested conditional and loop blocks ("flattening") as they can be achieved by only using the branching/jumping statements.
This program performs control flow flattening against the input .m script file. That's all it does. Currently, no renaming and string/constant obfuscation is implemented. I do plan to have constants obfuscation supported in the future.
Also, the switch/case keywords are not supported, and try/catch will not obfuscate the try block. The program is not yet optimized either and the code is a bit messy. The largest script I have run my program against is only around 50 KiB in size, so use it at your own risk.
Below is an example of the transformation made by this tool.
Original code:
Obfuscated code:
