On the analysis of software watermarking

In this knowledge era, the need of computer software becomes necessity not only to deal with scientific tasks but to solve our daily life activities. Being an intellectual outcome and a member of digital domain, software has to face the same threats like, illegal copying, unlawful re-distribution, malicious modification, misuse and etc. Many mechanisms were introduced like, copyright registration, licensing, intellectual property law, information auditing, security dongles and etc., to protect the lawful right of the developer. Taking piracy as a key concern, watermarking is the one in which the owner embeds some secret information in the code as a mark of identification to ensure and authenticate their ownership rights. During the last decade, different algorithms were developed to implement this scenario and to put resistance against known attacks. This paper is an attempt to give an analysis on piracy protection using watermarking techniques. This study focuses on the behavior of watermarks, embedding styles and algorithmic approaches.