Software Watermarking: State of the Art and Future Directions
Dr. Christian Collberg (University of Arizona)
ABSTRACT
Watermarking embeds a secret message into a cover message.
In media watermarking the secret is a copyright notice and
the cover a digital image, an audio file, or a video clip.
Watermarking an object discourages intellectual property theft,
or when such theft has occurred, allows us to prove ownership.
In this talk we will discuss the watermarking of software.
Informally, a software watermarking algorithm should embed
an integer W into a program such that W cannot be
easily found (the embedding is stealthy); W is as
large as possible (the algorithm has a high data rate);
W can still be extracted after an attacker has
translated, optimized, or obfuscated the watermarked program;
and the embedding does not adversely affect performance.
We will discuss how software watermarking algorithms should be
evaluated, present currently known algorithms and discuss their
strengths and weaknesses, and present future research directions.
Finally, we will demonstrate the SandMark tool which has been
designed to make it easy to implement and evaluate software
protection algorithms.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Collberg received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Lund, Sweden. He spent the next five years at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently an Assistant
Professor at the University of Arizona. His primary research area is
the protection of software from reverse engineering, tampering, and
piracy. In particular, the SandMark tool (sandmark.cs.arizona.edu)
developed at the University of Arizona is the premier tool for the
study
of software protection algorithms. Dr. Collberg has also worked on the
automatic retargeting of compilers, a search-engine for computer
scientists (algovista.cs.arizona.edu), no-cost static linking
(slinky.cs.arizona.edu), and a tool for self-plagiarism detection
(splat.cs.arizona.edu). In his spare time he writes, sings, and
plays guitar for The Zax (zaxband.com), the most awesomest garage
band in Tucson.