Register Expansion, SemaCall, and SideData: Three Low-Overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM
Schwarzbeck D, Novac D, Philippsen M (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article, Original article
Publication year: 2025
Journal
Book Volume: 6
Pages Range: 1-22
Article Number: 18
Journal Issue: 3
URI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3743152
DOI: 10.1145/3743152
Open Access Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3743152
Abstract
Software watermarking is a means of protection
against piracy and unauthorized tampering. We propose three dynamic
software watermarking techniques and show how we automatically insert
them into to-be-watermarked code. All three select many spots in the code and insert randomly generated and computationally different hash-like arithmetics that at runtime transform a secret input 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 results of a set of library
functions that the to-be-watermarked code calls. As the semantics of the
library functions 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. The SideData Watermark adapts the techniques from the SemaCall Watermark
to work on memory allocations. By detecting the secret input in the
allocated memory with an adapted hash generation, we can reuse the same
procedures to generate the message in an easter-egg. We show that
leveraging many and different hash-like arithmetics, our watermarks are hard to attack and also have a low performance overhead.
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How to cite
APA:
Schwarzbeck, D., Novac, D., & Philippsen, M. (2025). Register Expansion, SemaCall, and SideData: Three Low-Overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM. Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 6(3), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3743152
MLA:
Schwarzbeck, David, Daniela Novac, and Michael Philippsen. "Register Expansion, SemaCall, and SideData: Three Low-Overhead Dynamic Watermarks Suitable for Automation in LLVM." Digital Threats: Research and Practice 6.3 (2025): 1-22.
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