Over the course of his academic career, Jeffrey MacBride contributed to numerous engineering research publications and software applications projects. Most notably, MacBride’s research has focused on java obfuscation.
A Comparative Study of Java Obfuscators
In 2005, during his enrollment in a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rowan University, Jeffrey MacBride contributed to an important research study that focused on java obfuscators and obfuscation. The findings of this study were initially published in Proceedings of Software Engineering Applications in November 14-16, 2005. The research publication maintains contributions from not only MacBride, but also Christopher Mascioli, Scott Marks, Ying Tang, Linda M. Head and Ravi Ramachandran, MacBride’s peers at Rowan.
This research publication focuses largely on Java based applications. Although now obsolete, Java software development was growing exponentially across the internet at the time, due to the ease of transferability and platform independence.
A Qualitative Analysis of Java Obfuscation
Also published in Proceedings of Software Engineering Applications, this second study is an extension of the initial proposal. Published in 2006, this research publication includes contributions from Jeffrey MacBride, Matthew Karnick, Sean McGinnis, Ying Tang and Ravi Ramachandran. Completed through the College of Engineering at Rowan University, this study on java obfuscation taps into code obfuscation, or the defensive technology that secures software in a manner that makes reverse engineering virtually impossible, or prohibited. MacBride and his peers pursued this study because while there were a number of commercial obfuscation tools on the market at the time, there was no standard protocol for measuring, analyzing or evaluating the strength and weaknesses of such tools. MacBride’s study set out to evaluate just that, through research of four commercial obfuscators.
Both of these research publications on java obfuscators and java obfuscation are available for viewing online. To learn more about this comparative study in bytecode, be sure to read both studies in full online.
