A robust steganography-based software watermarking
Cheol Jeon, Yookun Cho · 2012
Software watermarking is widely used to protect intellectual property owners of software from piracy. However, existing proposed schemes have shortcomings such that the watermarks can be defeated by semantics-preserving code transformations such as code optimizations, code obfuscations; Moreover, the marks consist of complicated codes, so it can be difficult to combine them with existing program codes. In order to solve these problems, we present a novel software watermarking scheme based on steganography and the Chinese remainder theorem. The watermark is embedded into a program in the form of steganography using a calling convention, so our scheme neither depends on program codes nor increases program size. It also provides an error-correction based on the Chinese remainder theorem in the event that the parts of the watermark are compromised by a wide array of attacks.