Software Protection Against Illegal Copy Using Software Watermarking

摘要

In this paper, we propose software protection algorithm against illegal copy by unauthorized persons using software watermarking. In the proposed scheme, the software license information, related to the media access control (MAC) address and software product-key, is embedded into the software logotype image as a watermark sequence. At the first stage of the software execution, the watermark sequence is extracted from the logotype and compared with the current MAC address of the hardware devise. If the extracted MAC address differs from the hardware's MAC address, then the software displays a warning message related to the invalid license and finalizes its execution, otherwise the software continues its normal operation. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed from the difficulty of software piracy and reverse engineering points of view, and the evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.