Jiro's pick this week is Model Obfuscation Tool by Atsushi Ohashi.

Atsushi is a fellow MathWorker working out of the Nagoya office in Japan. He's part of the Pilot Engineering group, whose role is to help our key customers overcome technical challenges through deep engagements using MathWorks tools. Being in Japan, naturally our key customers tend to be in the automotive industry, where Simulink is heavily used.

As part of his job, from time to time his group needs to obtain Simulink models from our customers. Understandably, there are cases when our customers are hesitant on providing us with the models because of the confidential information (textual) included in the models. In many of those cases, simply obfuscating the textual information was enough to appease their concerns. Atsushi's tool does exactly that. In fact, the Japan Pilot Engineering team uses his tool for that purpose, and he thought he would make it more widely available.

The tool is very easy to use. Once you install it (there is an install script), a menu item is added to the Tools menu. Selecting the "ModelObfuscationTool" will bring up a dialog window, and clicking "Run" obfuscates your Simulink model.

Atsushi has included a nice help document, which should also get you started. He does state that there are cases where the operation may not succeed, so it's always good to check that the obfuscated model still runs.

By the way, here is an incomplete list of some other obfuscation techniques.

Comments

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Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2015b

Published with MATLAB® R2015b