Dynamic graph-based software fingerprinting

  • Authors:
  • Christian S. Collberg;Clark Thomborson;Gregg M. Townsend

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ;University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Fingerprinting embeds a secret message into a cover message. In media fingerprinting, the secret is usually a copyright notice and the cover a digital image. Fingerprinting an object discourages intellectual property theft, or when such theft has occurred, allows us to prove ownership. The Software Fingerprinting 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 this article, we describe a software fingerprinting technique in which a dynamic graph fingerprint is stored in the execution state of a program. Because of the hardness of pointer alias analysis such fingerprints are difficult to attack automatically.