Software theft detection through static trace birthmarks for java

Abstract

Recently, many software products have been developed as open source projects. Adopting an open source has the advantage of saving time and cost for developing software. For this reason, not only many programmers but also many software companies actively utilize open sources. However, illegal use of open sources may violate the license because open sources are released under the corresponding license. We need to be more cautious when developing software using open source because the licenses are strictly protected by copyright law. Generally, it is hard to recover original source codes from distributed commercial software because software is distributed in a binary format. However, Java applications are easy to analyze because Java applications are usually distributed as Java bytecodes that include much information to achieve high portability. Moreover, various decompilers were developed owing to the strict specification of the Java virtual machine. Thus, in most cases we can recover source codes from Java class files through decompilers even though the original source code is not available. As a result, Java applications are one of the most frequent targets of software theft. Hence, it is essential to devise techniques to detect code theft, especially for Java. Research on code theft has been conducted mostly on source code plagiarism detection techniques. If we can get the source code of a suspicious program, plagiarism detection may be the most effective technique. However, we cannot always get the source code because an application program is generally distributed in compiled binary format. There is another research, code clone detection, for software theft detection. Code clones are duplicated code lines of programs. If two different programs have code clones, we can suspect those programs as copied programs. However, such code clone techniques need source codes of two compared programs like code plagiarism detection. To identify copied software, software...