Dr. Collberg received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at University of Lund, Sweden. He spent the next five years at University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Arizona. His primary research area is the protection of software from reverse engineering, tampering, and piracy. In particular, the SandMark tool (sandmark.cs.arizona.edu) developed at University of Arizona is the premier tool for the study of software protection algorithms.  Dr. Collberg has also worked on automatic retargeting of compilers, a search　engine for computer scientists (algovista.cs.arizona.edu), no-cost static linking (slinky.cs.arizona.edu), and a tool for self-plagiarism detection (splat.cs.arizona.edu). In his spare time, he writes, sings, and plays guitar for The Zax (zaxband.com), the most awesome garage band in Tucson. Prof. Collberg is spending the 2006-07 academic year visiting Prof. Wang Fei-Yue at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Abstract

Watermarking embeds a secret message into a cover message. In media watermarking the secret is a copyright notice and the cover a digital image, an audio file, or a video clip. Watermarking an object discourages intellectual property theft, or when such theft has occurred, allows us to prove ownership.

In this talk we will discuss the watermarking of software. Informally, a software watermarking algorithm should embed an integer W into a program such that W cannot be easily found (the embedding is stealthy); W is as large as possible (the algorithm has a high data rate); W can still be extracted after an attacker has translated, optimized, or obfuscated the watermarked program; and the embedding does not adversely affect performance.

   We will discuss how software watermarking algorithms should be evaluated, present currently known algorithms and discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss future research directions. Finally, we will demonstrate the SandMark tool which has been designed to make it easy to implement and evaluate software protection algorithms.