Sandmark-A tool for software protection research

Collberg, Christian; Myles, Ginger; Huntwork, Andrew

doi:10.1109/msecp.2003.1219058

Cited by 115 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Collberg et al (2003) introduce several reordering techniques (e.g. method parameters, basic block instructions, variables, and constants), splitting of classes, basic blocks, arrays, and also merging of method parameters, classes.…”

Section: Obfuscation and Deobfuscationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The process of code plagiarism involves pervasive modifications to hide the plagiarism which often includes obfuscation. The goal of code obfuscation is to make the modified code harder to understand by humans and harder to reverse engineer whilst preserving its semantics (Whale 1990;Collberg et al 1997Collberg et al , 2002Collberg et al , 2003. Deobfuscation attempts to reverse engineer obfuscated code (Udupa et al 2005).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A comparison of code similarity analysers

2017

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Copying and pasting of source code is a common activity in software engineering. Often, the code is not copied as it is and it may be modified for various purposes; e.g. refactoring, bug fixing, or even software plagiarism. These code modifications could affect the performance of code similarity analysers including code clone and plagiarism detectors to some certain degree. We are interested in two types of code modification in this study: pervasive modifications, i.e. transformations that may have a global effect, and local modifications, i.e. code changes that are contained in a single method or code block. We evaluate 30 code similarity detection techniques and tools using five experimental scenarios for Java source code. These are (1) pervasively modified code, created with tools for source code and bytecode obfuscation, and boiler-plate code, (2) source code normalisation through compilation and decompilation using different decompilers, (3) reuse of optimal configurations over different data sets, (4) tool evaluation using ranked-based measures, and (5) local + global code modifications. Our experimental results show that in the presence of pervasive modifications, some of the general textual similarity measures can offer similar performance to specialised code similarity tools, whilst in the presence of boiler-plate code, highly specialised source code similarity detection techniques and tools outperform textual similarity measures. Our study strongly validates the use of compilation/decompilation as a normalisation technique. Its use reduced false classifications to zero for three of the tools. Moreover, we demonstrate that optimal configurations are very sensitive to a specific data set. After directly applying optimal configurations derived from one data set to another, the tools perform poorly on the new data set. The code similarity analysers are thoroughly evaluated not only based on several well-known pair-based and query-based error measures but also on each specific type of pervasive code modification. This broad, thorough study is the largest in existence and potentially an invaluable guide for future users of similarity detection in source code.

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Section: Obfuscation and Deobfuscationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of code similarity analysers

2017

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“…Therefore, it may be used for our objective. Watermarking is basically used to embed stealthy information in a piece of software, such as a software developer's copyright notation or a unique identifier of software, in a static manner [22]- [24], or in a dynamic manner [25]- [27]. Unfortunately, watermarking is not always feasible because it requires software developers to embed a watermark before releasing the software.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Java Birthmarks --Detecting the Software Theft--

Tamada¹

2005

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems

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and Ken-ichi MATSUMOTO † , Members SUMMARY To detect the theft of Java class files efficiently, we propose a concept of Java birthmarks, which are unique and native characteristics of every class file. For a pair of class files p and q, if q has the same birthmark as p's, q is suspected as a copy of p. Ideally, the birthmarks should satisfy the following properties: (a) preservation -the birthmarks should be preserved even if the original class file is tampered with, and (b) distinction -independent class files must be distinguished by completely different birthmarks. Taking (a) and (b) into account, we propose four types of birthmarks for Java class files. To show the effectiveness of the proposed birthmarks, we conduct three experiments. In the first experiment, we demonstrate that the proposed birthmarks are sufficiently robust against automatic program transformation (93.3876% of the birthmarks were preserved). The second experiment shows that the proposed birthmarks successfully distinguish non-copied files in a practical Java application (97.8005% of given class files were distinguished). In the third experiment, we exploit different Java compilers to confirm that the proposed Java birthmarks are core characteristics independent of compiler-specific issues.

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“…Sandmark [11] is a Java-based watermarking software that implements many static and dynamic watermarking schemes. Palsberg et al [21] describe an implementation of the dynamic watermarking scheme [9] to show its practicality.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We extend Sandmark [11] class hierarchy and methods. We reuse the graphbased encoding methods and represent each quadratic residue as a separate graph (each with a different encoding radix).…”

Section: Design and Implementationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Watermarking as a Proof of Identity: A Study of Zero Knowledge Proof Based Software Watermarking

Venkatachalam

2005

Digital Watermarking

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Abstract. Software watermarking has been proposed as a way to prove ownership of software intellectual property in order to contain software piracy. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking technique based on Zero Knowledge Proofs. The advantages are multi-fold. The watermark recognizer can now be distributed publicly. This helps in watermark being used as a proof for both authorship and authentication of the software. The watermark is shown as a mathematical proof which varies with every run instead of the watermark string as in the previous techniques. This watermarking scheme not only has a high degree of tamper resistance but also allows the protocol to point out the tampered subset of the embedded secret data. We present potential attacks on the protocol and discuss the strength of the watermarking scheme. We present empirical results based on our implementation.

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Sandmark-A tool for software protection research

Cited by 115 publications

References 13 publications

A comparison of code similarity analysers

A comparison of code similarity analysers

Java Birthmarks --Detecting the Software Theft--

Software Watermarking as a Proof of Identity: A Study of Zero Knowledge Proof Based Software Watermarking

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