K-gram based software birthmarks

Abstract

Software birthmarking relies on unique characteristics that are inherent to a program to identify the program in the event of suspected theft. In this paper we present and empirically evaluate a novel birthmarking technique which uniquely identifies a program through instruction sequences. To evaluate the strength of the birthmarking technique we examine two properties: credibility and resilience to semantics-preserving transformations. We show that the technique provides both high credibility and resilience. Additionally, it complements previously proposed static birthmarking techniques.