Industry vendors hesitate to disseminate proprietary applications to academia and third party vendors. By consequence, the bench-marking process is typically driven by standardized, open-source benchmarks which may be very different from and likely not representative of the real-life applications of interest. This paper proposes code mutation, a novel technique that mutates a proprietary application to complicate reverse engineering so that it can be distributed as a benchmark. The benchmark mutant then serves as a proxy for the proprietary application. The key idea in the proposed code mutation approach is to preserve the proprietary application's dynamic memory access and/or control flow behavior in the benchmark mutant while mutating the rest of the application code. To this end, we compute program slices for memory access operations and/or control flow operations trimmed through constant value and branch profiles; and subsequently mutate the instructions not appearing in these slices through binary rewriting. Our experimental results using SPEC CPU2000 and MiBench benchmarks show that code mutation is a promising technique that mutates up to 90% of the static binary, up to 50% of the dynamically executed instructions, and up to 35% of the at run time exposed inter-operation data dependencies. The performance characteristics of the mutant are very similar to those of the proprietary application across a wide range of microarchitectures and hardware implementations.

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{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Wicri/Belgique
   |area=    OpenAccessBelV2
   |flux=    Main
   |étape=   Exploration
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     Pascal:08-0302886
   |texte=   Dispersing Proprietary Applications as Benchmarks through Code Mutation
}}