SoftMark: Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation

Honggoo Kang; Yonghwi Kwon; Sangjin Lee; Hyungjoon Koo

doi:10.1145/3485832.3488027

SoftMark: Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation

Honggoo Kang, Yonghwi Kwon, Sangjin Lee, Hyungjoon Koo

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

The ease of reproducibility of digital artifacts raises a growing concern in copyright infringement; in particular, for a software product. Software watermarking is one of the promising techniques to verify the owner of licensed software by embedding a digital fingerprint. Developing an ideal software watermark scheme is challenging because i) unlike digital media watermarking, software watermarking must preserve the original code semantics after inserting software watermark, and ii) it requires well-balanced properties of credibility, resiliency, capacity, imperceptibility, and efficiency. We present SoftMark, a software watermarking system that leverages a function relocation where the order of functions implicitly encodes a hidden identifier. By design, SoftMark does not introduce additional structures (i.e., codes, blocks, or subroutines), being robust in unauthorized detection, while maintaining a negligible performance overhead and reasonable capacity. With various strategies against viable attacks (i.e., static binary re-instrumentation), we tackle the limitations of previous reordering-based approaches. Our empirical results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness by successful embedding and extraction of various watermark values.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings - 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	169-181
Number of pages	13
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450385794
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3485832.3488027
Publication status	Published - 2021 Dec 6
Event	37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States Duration: 2021 Dec 6 → 2021 Dec 10

Publication series

Name	ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference	37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021
Country/Territory	United States
City	Virtual, Online
Period	21/12/6 → 21/12/10

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank the anonymous referees and our shepherd Sang Kil Cha for their constructive feedback. This work was supported by Institute for Information & communication Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2019-0-01343, Regional strategic industry convergence security core talent training business), NSF under awards 1916499, 1908021, and 1850392. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Software
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Networks and Communications

Access to Document

10.1145/3485832.3488027

Cite this

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abstract = "The ease of reproducibility of digital artifacts raises a growing concern in copyright infringement; in particular, for a software product. Software watermarking is one of the promising techniques to verify the owner of licensed software by embedding a digital fingerprint. Developing an ideal software watermark scheme is challenging because i) unlike digital media watermarking, software watermarking must preserve the original code semantics after inserting software watermark, and ii) it requires well-balanced properties of credibility, resiliency, capacity, imperceptibility, and efficiency. We present SoftMark, a software watermarking system that leverages a function relocation where the order of functions implicitly encodes a hidden identifier. By design, SoftMark does not introduce additional structures (i.e., codes, blocks, or subroutines), being robust in unauthorized detection, while maintaining a negligible performance overhead and reasonable capacity. With various strategies against viable attacks (i.e., static binary re-instrumentation), we tackle the limitations of previous reordering-based approaches. Our empirical results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness by successful embedding and extraction of various watermark values.",

author = "Honggoo Kang and Yonghwi Kwon and Sangjin Lee and Hyungjoon Koo",

note = "Funding Information: We thank the anonymous referees and our shepherd Sang Kil Cha for their constructive feedback. This work was supported by Institute for Information & communication Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2019-0-01343, Regional strategic industry convergence security core talent training business), NSF under awards 1916499, 1908021, and 1850392. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.; 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021 ; Conference date: 06-12-2021 Through 10-12-2021",

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Kang, H, Kwon, Y, Lee, S & Koo, H 2021, SoftMark: Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation. in Proceedings - 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 169-181, 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021, Virtual, Online, United States, 21/12/6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485832.3488027

SoftMark : Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation. / Kang, Honggoo; Kwon, Yonghwi; Lee, Sangjin et al.

Proceedings - 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. p. 169-181 (ACM International Conference Proceeding Series).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

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SoftMark: Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation

Abstract

Publication series

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Bibliographical note

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

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