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Semantics-based software watermarking by abstract interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2018

MILA DALLA PREDA  and
MICHELE PASQUA Open the ORCID record for MICHELE PASQUA [Opens in a new window]
MILA DALLA PREDA
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Strada le Grazie 15, Verona 37134, Italy Emails: mila.dallapreda@univr.it, michele.pasqua@univr.it
MICHELE PASQUA
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Strada le Grazie 15, Verona 37134, Italy Emails: mila.dallapreda@univr.it, michele.pasqua@univr.it
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Abstract

Software watermarking is a software protection technique used to defend the intellectual property of proprietary code. In particular, software watermarking aims at preventing software piracy by embedding a signature, i.e. an identifier reliably representing the owner, in the code. When an illegal copy is made, the owner can claim his/her identity by extracting the signature. It is important to hide the signature in the program in order to make it difficult for the attacker to detect, tamper or remove it. In this work, we present a formal framework for software watermarking, based on program semantics and abstract interpretation, where attackers are modelled as abstract interpreters. In this setting, we can prove that the ability to identify signatures can be modelled as a completeness property of the attackers in the abstract interpretation framework. Indeed, hiding a signature in the code corresponds to embed it as a semantic property that can be retrieved only by attackers that are complete for it. Any abstract interpreter that is not complete for the property specifying the signature cannot detect, tamper or remove it. We formalize in the proposed framework the major quality features of a software watermarking technique: secrecy, resilience, transparence and accuracy. This provides a unifying framework for interpreting both watermarking schemes and attacks, and it allows us to formally compare the quality of different watermarking techniques. Indeed, a large number of watermarking techniques exist in the literature and they are typically evaluated with respect to their secrecy, resilience, transparence and accuracy to attacks. Formally identifying the attacks for which a watermarking scheme is secret, resilient, transparent or accurate can be a complex and error-prone task, since attacks and watermarking schemes are typically defined in different settings and using different languages (e.g. program transformation vs. program analysis), complicating the task of comparing one against the others.

Type
Paper
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , February 2019 , pp. 339 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

†

This work was partly supported by the MIUR FIRB 2013 project FACE RBFR13AJFT.

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