SoftMark: Software Watermarking via a Binary Function Relocation

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.