A New Method to Detect Software Theft Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (08/23/07)
as it appeared in the August 27, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Comparing the behavior of software programs is one way for companies to determine whether their software has been incorporated into other programs. Researchers at Saarland University in Germany have developed a tool, API Birthmark, which allows users to run their own program and a foreign program, analyze their behavior, and find similarities. A high degree of similarity detected by API Birthmark would suggest that code theft likely occurred, and that further investigation should be considered. The approach is different from other detection methods that focus on the code of the program, which can be easily obfuscated without destroying it, making it difficult to prove in court that software theft occurred. However, it would be difficult to change the behavior of a program without breaking it, similar to a birthmark. David Schuler, Valentin Dallmeier, and Christian Lindig have written a paper on the birthmarking technique, which was accepted for the Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2007) conference in Atlanta. Click Here to View Full Article
