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.