Experience with Software Watermarking

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Author

Jens Palsberg, Sowmya Krishnaswamy, Minseok Kwon, Di Ma, Qiuyun Shao, Yi Zhang

Tech report number

CERIAS TR 2004-30

Entry type

inproceedings

Abstract

There are at least four U.S. patents on software watermarking, and an idea for further advancing the state of the art was presented in 1999 by Collberg and Thomborsen. The new idea is to embed a watermark in dynamic data structures, thereby protecting against many programtransformation attacks. Until now there have been no reports on practical experience with this technique We have implemented and experimented with a watermarking system for Java based on the ideas of Collberg and Thomborsen. Our experiments show that watermarking can be done efficiently with moderate increases in code size, execution times, and heap-space usage, while making the watermarked code resilient to a variety of programtransformation attacks. For a particular representation of watermarks, the time to retrieve a watermark is on the order of one minute per megabyte of heap space. Our implementation is not designed to resists all possible attacks; to do that it should be combined with other protection techniques such as obfuscation and tamperproofing.

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Date

2000 – 12

Institution

Purdue University

Key alpha

Palsberg

Publisher

Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Affiliation

Department of Computer Sciences

Publication Date

2000-12-01

Subject

Watermarking

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@Inproceedings{ Palsberg,
	title = "Experience with Software Watermarking",
	author = "Jens Palsberg, Sowmya Krishnaswamy, Minseok Kwon, Di Ma, Qiuyun Shao, Yi Zhang",
	year = "2000",
	month = "12",
	institution = "Purdue University",
	publisher = "Annual Computer Security Applications Conference",
	abstract = "There are at least four U.S. patents on software watermarking, and an idea for further advancing the state of the art was presented in 1999 by Collberg and Thomborsen. The new idea is to embed a watermark in dynamic data structures, thereby protecting against many programtransformation attacks. Until now there have been no reports on practical experience with this technique

We have implemented and experimented with a watermarking system for Java based on the ideas of Collberg and Thomborsen. Our experiments show that watermarking can be done efficiently with moderate increases in code size, execution times, and heap-space usage, while making the watermarked code resilient to a variety of programtransformation attacks. For a particular representation of watermarks, the time to retrieve a watermark is on the order of one minute per megabyte of heap space. Our implementation is not designed to resists all possible attacks; to do that it should be combined with other protection techniques such as obfuscation and tamperproofing. ",
	affiliation = "Department of Computer Sciences",
	subject = "Watermarking",
}