Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection

Product Author Bios

Christian Collberg received a B.Sc. in computer science and numerical analysis and a Ph.D. in computer science from Lund University, Sweden. He is currently an associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Arizona and has also worked at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Professor Collberg is a leading researcher in the intellectual property protection of software, and also maintains an interest in compiler and programming language research. In his spare time he writes songs, sings, and plays guitar for The Zax and hopes one day to finish his Great Swedish Novel.

Jasvir Nagra received his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He’s been a postdoctoral scholar on the RE-TRUST project at the University of Trento, where his focus is on applying obfuscation, tamperproofing, and watermarking techniques to protect the integrity of software executing on a remote untrusted platform. His research interests also include the design of programming languages and its impact on the security of applications. He’s currently with Google Inc., where he is building Caja, an open source, secure subset of JavaScript. In his spare time Jasvir dabbles with Lego and one day hopes to finish building his Turing machine made entirely out of Lego blocks.

“This book gives thorough, scholarly coverage of an area of growing importance in computer security and is a ‘must have’ for every researcher, student, and practicing professional in software protection.”
    —Mikhail Atallah, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University

Theory, Techniques, and Tools for Fighting Software Piracy, Tampering, and Malicious Reverse Engineering

The last decade has seen significant progress in the development of techniques for resisting software piracy and tampering. These techniques are indispensable for software developers seeking to protect vital intellectual property. Surreptitious Software is the first authoritative, comprehensive resource for researchers, developers, and students who want to understand these approaches, the level of security they afford, and the performance  penalty they incur.

Christian Collberg and Jasvir Nagra bring together techniques drawn from related areas of computer science, including cryptography, steganography, watermarking, software metrics, reverse engineering, and compiler optimization. Using extensive sample code, they show readers how to implement protection schemes ranging from code obfuscation and software fingerprinting to tamperproofing and birthmarking, and discuss the theoretical and practical limitations of these techniques.

Coverage includes

• Mastering techniques that both attackers and defenders use to analyze programs
• Using code obfuscation to make software harder to analyze and understand
• Fingerprinting software to identify its author and to trace software pirates
• Tamperproofing software using guards that detect and respond to illegal modifications of code and data
• Strengthening content protection through dynamic watermarking and dynamic obfuscation
• Detecting code theft via software similarity analysis and birthmarking algorithms
• Using hardware techniques to defend software and media against piracy and tampering
• Detecting software tampering in distributed system
• Understanding the theoretical limits of code obfuscation

Related Article

Top 4 Software Development Protection Techniques and How to Defeat Them

Online Sample Chapter

What Is Surreptitious Software?

Sample Pages

Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 1 and Index)

Table of Contents

Preface xv
About the Authors xxv
Acknowledgments xxvii

Chapter 1: What Is Surreptitious Software?      1
1.1   Setting the Scene 1
1.2   Attack and Defense 6
1.3   Program Analysis 7
1.4   Code Obfuscation 13
1.5   Tamperproofing 32
1.6   Software Watermarking 36
1.7   Software Similarity 43
1.8   Hardware-Based Protection Techniques 49
1.9   Discussion 55
1.10 Notation 58

Chapter 2: Methods of Attack and Defense      59
2.1   Attack Strategies 60
2.2   Defense Strategies 86
2.3   Discussion 114

Chapter 3: Program Analysis      117
3.1   Static Analysis 118
3.2   Dynamic Analysis 145
3.3   Reconstituting Source 170
3.4   Pragmatic Analysis 190
3.5   Discussion 198

Chapter 4: Code Obfuscation      201
4.1   Semantics-Preserving Obfuscating Transformations 202
4.2   Definitions 217
4.3   Complicating Control Flow 225
4.4   Opaque Predicates 246
4.5   Data Encodings 258
4.6   Breaking Abstractions 277
4.7   Discussion 298

Chapter 5: Obfuscation Theory      301
5.1   Definitions 304
5.2   Provably Secure Obfuscation: Possible or Impossible? 307
5.3   Provably Secure Obfuscation: It’s Possible (Sometimes)! 313
5.4   Provably Secure Obfuscation: It’s Impossible (Sometimes)! 335
5.5   Provably Secure Obfuscation: Can It Be Saved? 344
5.6   Discussion 354

Chapter 6: Dynamic Obfuscation      357
6.1   Definitions 360
6.2   Moving Code Around 362
6.3   Encryption 383
6.4   Discussion 398

Chapter 7: Software Tamperproofing      401
7.1   Definitions 405
7.2   Introspection 412
7.3   Algorithm TPTCJ: Response Mechanisms 440
7.4   State Inspection 444
7.5   Remote Tamperproofing 453
7.6   Discussion 464

Chapter 8: Software Watermarking      467
8.1   History and Applications 468
8.2   Watermarking Software 478
8.3   Definitions 480
8.4   Watermarking by Permutation 486
8.5   TamperproofingWatermarks 494
8.6   Improving Resilience 498
8.7   Improving Stealth 505
8.8   Steganographic Embeddings 522
8.9   SplittingWatermark Integers 526
8.10 Graph Codecs 533
8.11 Discussion 537

Chapter 9: Dynamic Watermarking      541
9.1   Algorithm WMCT: Exploiting Aliasing 546
9.2   Algorithm WMNT: Exploiting Parallelism 565
9.3   Algorithm WMCCDKHLS_paths: Expanding Execution Paths 583
9.4   Algorithm WMCCDKHLS_bf : Tamperproofing Execution Paths 592
9.5   Discussion 598

Chapter 10: Software Similarity Analysis      601
10.1   Applications 602
10.2   Definitions 611
10.3   k-gram-Based Analysis 616
10.4   API-Based Analysis 625
10.5   Tree-Based Analysis 631
10.6   Graph-Based Analysis 635
10.7   Metrics-Based Analysis 644
10.8   Discussion 652

Chapter 11: Hardware for Protecting Software      655
11.1   Anti-Piracy by Physical Distribution 657
11.2   Authenticated Boot Using a Trusted Platform Module 670
11.3   Encrypted Execution 683
11.4   Attacks on Tamperproof Devices 695
11.5   Discussion 711

Bibliography 713
Index 737