An efficient software watermark by equation reordering and FDOS

Abstract

Software watermarking is the process of hiding information in a program or source code to protect the piracy of the software. Software piracy is a great threat for software industry because of every country losing millions of dollars every year. To protect the software piracy of the software's, variety of prevention techniques have been developed for copyright protection of software codes using both hardware and software. But, unfortunately no single technique is currently strong enough to protect the piracy of software codes. However, through a combination of techniques software developers are using for better protection of their software codes. In this paper, we have explained various static and dynamic techniques of software watermarking. In static watermarking techniques, the watermarks are stored in the source code, either in data section or code section where as in dynamic watermarking techniques the watermarks are generated during program execution. In this paper we have proposed a combination of static software watermarking techniques for structural programming by equation reordering and function dependency oriented sequencing (FDOS). In this method we embed the watermark in source code by a nested procedure wherein we firstly interchange the safe operands of mathematical equation and secondly impose an ordering on the mutual independent functions by introducing bogus dependency. © 2012 Springer India Pvt. Ltd.