Watermarking Software to Signal Copy Protection

Abstract

Enforcement of copyright laws of software products is primarily managed in legal way, as the available technological solutions are not strong enough to prevent illegal distribution and use of software. This situation is particularly dangerous on the growing market of mobile software products: the lack of protection may be the most important setback of the expansion of this market, although we have all the necessary components to assure a trusted environment on handsets. In this paper we present our copy protection scheme called Swotector targeting primarily mobile phone applications, which combines techniques of obfuscation and software-watermarking to provide a solution which is purely technical, however still provides the necessary flexibility. Our test results have shown that the solution is efficient enough to overcome current challenges of software copy protection, above all the ability of the operating system to run both protected and non-protected applications.