Software watermarking

TLDR

Watermarking embeds a secret message into a cover medium, typically a copyright notice in a digital image, to deter intellectual property theft and enable ownership proof. The paper aims to embed a robust, stealthy watermark structure into software that survives transformations, preserves performance, and can be proven to be deliberately inserted, and introduces a dynamic graphic watermark stored in execution state. The authors develop a taxonomy of software watermarking methods, formalize their properties, and propose a dynamic graphic watermark stored in program execution state.

Abstract

Watermarking embeds a secret message into a cover message. In media watermarking the secret is usually a copyright notice and the cover a digital image. Watermarking an object discourages intellectual property theft, or when such theft has occurred, allows us to prove ownership.The Software Watermarking 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 the first part of the paper we construct an informal taxonomy of software watermarking techniques. In the second part we formalize these results. Finally, we propose a new software watermarking technique in which a dynamic graphic watermark is stored in the execution state of a program.