Digital Fingerprinting on Executable File for Tracking Illegal Uproaders

Unauthorized use of digital contents has become a problem in recent years. In particular, spread of illegally copied software is getting serious. Conventional approaches have drawbacks that they hamper the convenience of legitimate users. In this study, we bring up another idea "identifying the person who illegally distributed a fraud software code" so as not to limit the rights of innocent users, by embedding digital fingerprinting. In our digital fingerprinting scheme, code blocks of the target execution code are fragmented and reordered at random. Fingerprint is embedded as the control for execution of the fragmented code blocks in the original order. Dummy codes are inserted so that attackers would have difficulty in tracking the original execution flow and removing the fingerprint. A preliminary evaluation shows that of a fingerprinted code based on our scheme has enough robustness against existing obfuscator and our system works enough efficiently in execution time.