A robust software watermarking framework using shellcode

Watermarks have long been applied to ensure the authenticity of media contents. Computer software is an intellectual outcome in the digital domain. Therefore, it has to face all the common threats like illegal redistribution, copying, misuse through malicious modification. However, the majority of the existing software watermarking techniques are suffering from the limitations of existing robustness notions and lack of resilience from a variety of attacks. In this paper, we proposed a novel robust software watermarking scheme based on “shellcode”. It is a small piece of code generally used as the payload in the exploitation of a software vulnerability. It consists of a list of carefully arranged machine instructions, executed through injecting into a running application. Shellcode serves as the backbone of our proposed watermarking scheme. It is used to achieve both covert communication (steganography), and deterrence (watermarking) process in the proposed watermarking technique. Such a combination gives more robustness and security to the whole process. In this paper, we introduce ShellMark as a proof of concept to illustrate the shellcode based software watermarking technique. We compared and tested ShellMark with already existing software watermarking techniques, and it showed that ShellMark is resilient to most of the well known watermarking attacks.