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Automatic Simplification of Obfuscated JavaScript Code (Extended Abstract)

Gen Lu   Kevin Coogan,   Saumya Debray
Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A.
 

Abstract
Javascript is a scripting language that is commonly used to create sophisticated interactive client-side web applications. It can also be used to carry out browser-based attacks on users. Malicious JavaScript code is usually highly obfuscated, making detection a challenge. This paper describes a simple approach to deobfuscation of JavaScript code based on dynamic analysis and slicing. Experiments using a prototype implementation indicate that our approach is able to penetrate multiple layers of complex obfuscations and extract the core logic of the computation.