Graph Theoretic Software Watermarks: Implementation, Analysis, and Attacks

Abstract

This paper presents an implementation of the novel watermarking method proposed by Venkatesan, Vazirani, and Sinha in their recent paper A Graph Theoretic Approach to Software Watermarking. An executable program is marked by the addition of code for which the topology of the control-flow graph encodes a watermark. We discuss issues that were identified during construction of an actual implementation that operates on Java bytecode. We measure the size and time overhead of watermarking, and evaluate the algorithm against a variety of attacks.