Threading Software Watermarks

We introduce a new dynamic technique for embedding robust software watermarks into a software program using thread contention. We show the technique to be resilient to many semantic-preserving transformations that most existing proposals are susceptible to. We describe the technique for encoding the watermark as a bit string and a scheme for embedding and recognizing the watermark using thread contention. Experimental results with Java bytecode indicate that thread based watermarks have small impact on the size of applications and only a modest effect on their speed.

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