Tigress is labeled as an "obfuscator" that forces people to "crack, and re-crack, the code", for "software protection" from the owner of an "untrusted remote si

Tigress is labeled as an "obfuscator" that forces people to "crack, and re-crack, the code", for "software protection" from the owner of an "untrusted remote site" [i.e. you on your computer] - its main purpose is to prevent people who already have full access to the binaries from understanding them. This is somewhat related to the type of benign diversification that mitigates exploitation - preventing code that has limited access to the system from pumping the weird machine correctly - but, I think, not much. Many techniques required for the first are useless for the second: if everything is open source, or even if it's not and the attacker is smart enough (unlike most protection measures which are supposed to be independent of intelligence...), then measures implemented by this tool like 'virtualization' (i.e. indirecting execution through an interpreter), branch obfuscation, etc. can be undone easily by an attacker with full access to memory; if the attacker doesn't have full access, there are much simpler and more performant types of randomization that are equally good at defeating them. And measures useful for the second (generally, anything that involves multiple variations of the same version of a program, to force exploiters to learn which one is in use) are no good against the first (since the attacker can just pick one to extract secrets from).