A dynamic birthmark for java

  • Authors:

  • David Schuler;Valentin Dallmeier;Christian Lindig

  • Affiliations:

  • Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Code theft is a threat for companies that consider code asa core asset. A birthmark can help them to prove codetheft by identifying intrinsic properties of a program. Twoprograms with the same birthmark are likely to share a com-mon origin. Birthmarking works in particular for code thatwas not protected by tamper-resistant copyright notices thatotherwise could prove ownership.We propose a dynamic birthmark for Java that observes howa program uses objects provided by the Java Standard API.Such a birthmark is difficult to foil because it captures the observable semantics of a program. In an evaluation, ourAPI Birthmark reliably identified XML parsers and PNGreaders before and after obfuscating them with state-of-the-art obfuscation tools. These rendered existing birthmarksineffective, such as the Whole-Program-Path Birthmark byMyles and Collberg