Hiding software watermarks in loop structures

Abstract

In this paper we propose a software watermarking technique based on the fact that different semantic instances might be abstracted in the same syntactic object. Our idea is to hide the watermark in a particular semantic instance and to distribute the corresponding syntactic construct. The extraction process uses a secret key in order to recover the information loss and reconstruct the watermark. In particular, we focus on loops and we base the embedding and extraction algorithm on the semantic understanding of loop-unrolling. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.