Dynamic K-Gram Based Software Birthmark

Yameng Bai   Xingming Sun   Guang Sun   Xiaohong Deng   Xiaoming Zhou   
Hunan Univ., Changsha;

This paper appears in: Software Engineering, 2008. ASWEC 2008. 19th Australian Conference on 
Publication Date: 26-28 March 2008 On page(s): 644-649
ISSN: 1530-0803
ISBN: 978-0-7695-3100-7
INSPEC Accession Number: 9913131
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ASWEC.2008.4483257 
Date Published in Issue: 2008-04-03 16:09:00.0

Abstract

Software theft is a threat for companies that consider code as a core asset.
A birthmark can help to prove software theft by identifying intrinsic properties of a program. Two 
programs with the same birthmark are likely to share a common origin. In this paper, we propose a 
novel dynamic birthmark.
Using a dynamic program slicing tool with the given input, a union of k-gram instruction-sequence 
sets denoted as birthmark is used to identify a program uniquely. To evaluate the strength of the 
birthmarking technique, we compare static k-gram based software birthmark with dynamic approach 
from similarity with academic obfuscation tools. The result shows that the new birthmark provides 
both high credibility and resilience. In particular, it proves that the dynamic birthmark is more 
resilient to semantics-preserving transformations than the static k-gram birthmark.