Behavior based software theft detection

  • Authors:

  • Xinran Wang;Yoon-Chan Jhi;Sencun Zhu;Peng Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Pennsylvania State University, state college, PA, USA;Pennsylvania State University, state college, PA, USA;Pennsylvania State University, state college, PA, USA;Pennsylvania State University, state college, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Along with the burst of open source projects, software theft (or plagiarism) has become a very serious threat to the healthiness of software industry. Software birthmark, which represents the unique characteristics of a program, can be used for software theft detection. We propose a system call dependence graph based software birthmark called SCDG birthmark, and examine how well it reflects unique behavioral characteristics of a program. To our knowledge, our detection system based on SCDG birthmark is the first one that is capable of detecting software component theft where only partial code is stolen. We demonstrate the strength of our birthmark against various evasion techniques, including those based on different compilers and different compiler optimization levels as well as two state-of-the-art obfuscation tools. Unlike the existing work that were evaluated through small or toy software, we also evaluate our birthmark on a set of large software. Our results show that SCDG birthmark is very practical and effective in detecting software theft that even adopts advanced evasion techniques.