Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Abstract

Source code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not realistic in the present scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is one of the possible solutions for this problem. A novel watermarking technique is employed so that it can be easily and reliably detected by special techniques. In this paper, verification methods are presented to detect software plagiarism in the embedded application software without the implemented source code. All the approaches use side-channel information obtained during the execution of the suspicious code. The primary method is passive, i.e. no previous modification of the original code is required. It determines that the Hamming weights of the executed instructions of the suspicious device are used and uses string matching algorithms for comparisons with a reference implementation. The other method inserts additional code fragments as a watermark that can be identified in the power consumption of the executed source code. Proposed approaches are robust against code-transformation attacks.