Evaluating Effectiveness of Tamper Proofing on Dynamic Graph Software Watermarks

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of combining tamper proofing with dynamic graph software watermarks using constant encoding and splitting, showing increased resilience at the cost of performance overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of constant encoding and splitting with Thomborson’s watermarking technique to enhance tamper resistance in dynamic graph software watermarks.

Findings

Constant encoding increases code size and execution time.

Tamper proofed code resists semantic-preserving attacks.

The approach enhances watermark robustness against transformations.

Abstract

For enhancing the protection level of dynamic graph software watermarks and for the purpose of conducting the analysis which evaluates the effect of integrating two software protection techniques such as software watermarking and tamper proofing, constant encoding technique along with the enhancement through the idea of constant splitting is proposed. In this paper Thomborson technique has been implemented with the scheme of breaking constants which enables to encode all constants without having any consideration about their values with respect to the value of watermark tree. Experimental analysis which have been conducted and provided in this paper concludes that the constant encoding process significantly increases the code size, heap space usage, and execution time, while making the tamper proofed code resilient to variety of semantic preserving program transformation attacks.