Dynamic graph-based software fingerprinting

Abstract

Fingerprinting embeds a secret message into a cover message. In media fingerprinting, the secret is usually a copyright notice and the cover a digital image. Fingerprinting an object discourages intellectual property theft, or when such theft has occurred, allows us to prove ownership.The Software Fingerprinting problem can be described as follows. Embed a structure W into a program P such that: W can be reliably located and extracted from P even after P has been subjected to code transformations such as translation, optimization and obfuscation; W is stealthy; W has a high data rate; embedding W into P does not adversely affect the performance of P ; and W has a mathematical property that allows us to argue that its presence in P is the result of deliberate actions.In this article, we describe a software fingerprinting technique in which a dynamic graph fingerprint is stored in the execution state of a program. Because of the hardness of pointer alias analysis such fingerprints are difficult to attack automatically.

A method for detecting the theft of Java programs through analysis of the control flow information

“…The dynamic watermarks are embedded in such a way that the identifiers can be extracted while programs are running with predefined input sequences. There have been several approaches for dynamic watermarking, such as Easter egg watermark [13,14], data structure watermark [13], execution trace watermark [16,17], and branch-based watermark [31]. Software watermarking methods can be applied only to programs that have been watermarked before releasing.…”

Ranking servers based on energy savings for computation offloading

“…The information may use pointers to hide graphs since pointer analysis is NP-complete [15]. Collberg et al [16] use a radix graph to hide a watermark in programs. When a program is executed with a certain input, the hidden watermark is revealed to identify the software as copyrighted.…”

Hiding Information in Completeness Holes: New Perspectives in Code Obfuscation and Watermarking

“…Graph-based watermarking: the dynamic graph-based watermarking encodes the watermark in a suitable data-structure which is allocated in memory [12,42]. In this case, programs states are as above, including the sequence of input values i ∈ V * which still have to be consumed: c, R, H, i , η = {I, Σ * } where i ∈ V * is a given input sequence, Ñ = {E(s), Σ * } where E(s) is the encoding of s as a graph G s ∈ G. α observes the graphs encoded in memory, by looking at graphs in reverse allocation order.…”