A Software Watermarking Method Based on Program Execution Time

Currently, a main problem in software is repackaging or plagiarization, which means attackers can add malicious payloads or advertisements into legitimate APPs through piggybacking, it greatly threatens the users and original developers. In this paper, a novel Software Watermarking method based on Program Execution Time (SW_PET) is proposed. By generating a variety of effect-canceling operations, the watermark information can be encoded into the form of program execution time, and can be embedded into Android APPs. In the detection process, the watermark information is extracted and compared with the original watermark to check whether the APP is repackaged. This method can be combined with other types of watermarks (e.g., picture-based watermarks) in order to enhance the robustness. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified, and the overhead introduced by the watermark is measured, which is demonstrated to be minimal.