Hidden Path: Dynamic Software Watermarking Based on Control Flow Obfuscation

摘要

Software watermarking is a general tool usedto combat software piracy by embedding identifying informationinto a program. Most existing schemes of softwarewatermarking have the weak point that the security onlydepends on the stealth of the watermark structure. Besides,the watermarking is independent of program in semantic leveland can be destroyed via fairly straightforward semanticspreservingcode transformations. To mitigate such problems,this paper introduces control flow obfuscation to build anovel dynamic software watermarking framework. By usingcontrol flow obfuscation, we skilfully connect several obfuscatedbranches to construct a hidden execution path. The watermarkingis divided to fragments and each fragment is “stored”in each obfuscated branch. As a part of obfuscated branches,watermarking is closely associated with program internal logic.The security can be reduced to the difficulty of reversing theseobfuscated branches, rather than the stealth of watermarkstructure. We choose neural network as obfuscator; and deployour watermarking in SPEC-2006int benchmarks. We providethe evaluation in overhead, data-rate, resiliency. Experimentalresults indicate that the proposed method has enough resilienceagainst common attacks, yet practical in terms of performance