Software obfuscation has always been a controversially discussed research area. Autotransplantation is also already useful: in 26 hours computation time we successfully autotransplanted the H.264 video encoding functionality from the x264 system to the VLC media player compare this to upgrading x264 within VLC, a task that we estimate, from VLC's version history, took human programmers an average of 20 days of elapsed, as opposed to dedicated, time. While we do not claim automated transplantation is now a solved problem, our results are encouraging: we report that in 12 of 15 experiments, involving 5 donors and 3 hosts (all popular real-world systems), we successfully autotransplanted new functionality and passed all regression tests. Leveraging lightweight annotation, program analysis identifies an organ (interesting behavior to transplant) testing validates that the organ exhibits the desired behavior during its extraction and after its implantation into a host. This paper introduces a theory, an algorithm, and a tool that achieve this.

Automated transplantation would open many exciting avenues for software development: suppose we could autotransplant code from one system into another, entirely unrelated, system.

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