Andrew S. Huntwork

Dynamic path-based software watermarking

Software watermarking is a tool used to combat software piracy by embedding identifying information into a program. Most existing proposals for software watermarking have the shortcoming that the mark can be destroyed via fairly straightforward semantics-preserving code transformations. This paper introduces path-based watermarking, a new approach to software watermarking based on the dynamic branching behavior of programs. The advantage of this technique is that error-correcting and tamper-proofing techniques can be used to make path-based watermarks resilient against a wide variety of attacks. Experimental results, using both Java bytecode and IA-32 native code, indicate that even relatively large watermarks can be embedded into programs at modest cost.

Sandmark-A tool for software protection research

Sandmark is a tool that measures the effectiveness of software-based methods for protecting software from piracy, tampering, and reverse engineering. The Sandmark teams goal is to develop techniques that will let users determine empirically which algorithms have the least performance overhead and the highest resilience to attacks.

More on graph theoretic software watermarks: Implementation, analysis, and attacks

This paper presents an implementation of the watermarking method proposed by Venkatesan et al. in their paper [R. Venkatesan, V. Vazirani, S. Sinha, A graph theoretic approach to software watermarking, in: Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, 2001]. An executable program is marked by the addition of code for which the topology of the control-flow graph encodes a watermark. We discuss issues that were identified during construction of an actual implementation that operates on Java bytecode. We present two algorithms for splitting a watermark number into a redundant set of pieces and an algorithm for turning a watermark number into a control-flow graph. We measure the size and time overhead of watermarking, and evaluate the algorithm against a variety of attacks.

Graph theoretic software watermarks: implementation, analysis, and attacks

This paper presents an implementation of the novel watermarking method proposed by Venkatesan, Vazirani, and Sinha in their recent paper A Graph Theoretic Approach to Software Watermarking. An executable program is marked by the addition of code for which the topology of the control-flow graph encodes a watermark. We discuss issues that were identified during construction of an actual implementation that operates on Java bytecode. We measure the size and time overhead of watermarking, and evaluate the algorithm against a variety of attacks.