Register Expansion and SemaCall: 2 Low-overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM
Schwarzbeck D, Novac D, Philippsen M (2024)
Publication Language: English
Publication Status: Accepted
Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article
Future Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2024
Publisher: ACM
Edited Volumes: Proceedings of Research on offensive and defensive techniques in the context of Man At The End (MATE) attacks
City/Town: New York
Pages Range: (to appear)
Conference Proceedings Title: CheckMATE '24: Proceedings of the 2024 Research on offensive and defensive techniques in the context of Man At The End (MATE) attacks
Event location: Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Software watermarking is a means of protection against issues of piracy and unauthorized tampering. We propose two dynamic software watermarking techniques and show how we added them to the LLWM framework for automatic insertion into to-be-watermarked code. Both select many spots in the code and insert randomly generated and computationally different hash-like arithmetics that at runtime transform a secret input key into a watermark message. The Register Expansion Watermark expands 32 bit values to 64 bits and piggy-backs hash computed values upon existing computations to spread the message around. The SemaCall Watermark performs its hash arithmetics on the result of a set of library functions that the to-be-watermarked code calls. As their semantics is known, we can compare the generated hash values to the ones expected for the secret input and then trigger an easter-egg that generates the message. We show that leveraging many and different hash-like arithmetics, our watermarks are harder to attack than other state-of-the-art techniques and also have a low performance overhead.
Authors with CRIS profile
David Schwarzbeck
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 2 (Programmiersysteme)
Daniela Novac
Department Informatik
Michael Philippsen
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 2 (Programmiersysteme)
Related research project(s)
How to cite
APA:
Schwarzbeck, D., Novac, D., & Philippsen, M. (2024). Register Expansion and SemaCall: 2 Low-overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM. In CheckMATE '24: Proceedings of the 2024 Research on offensive and defensive techniques in the context of Man At The End (MATE) attacks (pp. (to appear)). Salt Lake City, UT, US: New York: ACM.
MLA:
Schwarzbeck, David, Daniela Novac, and Michael Philippsen. "Register Expansion and SemaCall: 2 Low-overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM." Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'24), Workshop on Offensive and Defensive Techniques in the Context of Man At The End (MATE) attacks (Checkmate ’24), Salt Lake City, UT New York: ACM, 2024. (to appear).
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