Detecting Software Similarity Using API Sequences on Static Major Paths
Seongsoo Park, Hwansoo Han · Journal of KIISE · 2014
Software birthmarks are used to detect software plagiarism. For binaries, however, only a few birthmarks have been developed. In this paper, we propose a static approach to generate API sequences along major paths, which are analyzed from control flow graphs of the binaries. Since our API sequences are extracted along the most plausible paths of the binary codes, they can represent actual API sequences produced from binary executions, but in a more concise form. Our similarity measures use the Smith-Waterman algorithm that is one of the popular sequence alignment algorithms for DNA sequence analysis. We evaluate our static path-based API sequence with multiple versions of five applications. Our experiment indicates that our proposed method provides a quite reliable similarity birthmark for binaries.