Copy protection through software
watermarking and obfuscation
Gergely Eberhardt, Zoltán Nagy
SEARCH-LAB Ltd.
gergely.eberhardt@search-lab.hu
zoltan.nagy@search-lab.hu
Ernő Jeges, Zoltán Hornák
BME, Department of Measurement and Information Systems, SEARCH Laboratory
jeges@mit.bme.hu
hornak@mit.bme.hu
Enforcement of copyright laws in the field of software products is primarily managed in legal way by the software developer companies, as the available technological solutions are not strong enough to prevent illegal distribution and use of software. Almost all copy protection techniques were cracked within some weeks after their market launch. The lack of technical copyright enforcement solutions is responsible for the failure of some recently appeared business models, partially also for the recent dotcom crash. The situation is particularly dangerous in case of the growing market of mobile software products. In this paper we aim at proposing a scheme which combines obfuscating and software-watermarking techniques in order to provide a solution which is purely technical, but strong enough to overcome the problems concerning software copy protection. The solution we propose is focusing primarily on mobile software products, where we can rely on the hardware based integrity protection of the operating system.