Revisiting software protection

We provide a selective survey on software protection, including approaches to software tamper resistance, obfuscation, software diversity, and white-box cryptography. We review the early literature in the area plus recent activities related to trusted platforms, and discuss challenges and future directions

Modelling the false alarm and missed detection rate for electronic watermarks

Theoretical modeling of watermarks allow prediction of the detector reliability and facilitates the development of more reliable systems. In particular, mathematical evaluation is relevant to estimate the rate at which “false alarms” occur. In this paper, the probability of incorrect detection (missed detection or false alarm) is expressed in terms of the watermark-energy-to-image-luminance-variance ratio. We present some counterintuitive results which show for instance that the reliability of detection significantly depends on spatial correlation in watermark. Moreover we find that a small but uncompensated random DC component in the watermark can have a significant effect on the reliability

Java obfuscation with a theoretical basis for building secure mobile agents

Abstract. In this paper we propose novel techniques to obfuscate Java programs for developing secure mobile agent systems. Our obfuscation techniques take advantage of polymorphism and exception mechanism of object-oriented languages and can drastically reduce the precision of points-to analysis of the programs. We show that determining precise points-to analysis in obfuscated programs is NP-hard and the fact provides a theoretical basis for our obfuscation techniques. Furthermore, in this paper we present some empirical experiments, whereby we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches