Software Watermarking using Return-Oriented Programming

• Main Authors: Ma, Haoyu, Lu, Kangjie, Ma, Xinjie, Zhang, Haining, Jia, Chunfu, GAO, Debin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: code obfuscation; return-oriented programming; reverse engineering; software watermarking; Computer Sciences; Information Security
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2633; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3633/viewcontent/asiaccs15.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We propose a novel dynamic software watermarking design based on Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Our design formats watermarking code into well-crafted data arrangements that look like normal data but could be triggered to execute. Once triggered, the pre-constructed ROP execution will recover the hidden watermark message. The proposed ROP-based watermarking technique is more stealthy and resilient over existing techniques since the watermarking code is allocated dynamically into data region and therefore out of reach of attacks based on code analysis. Evaluations show that our design not only achieves satisfying stealth and resilience, but also causes significantly lower overhead to the watermarked program.