A Performance Comparison on Characteristics of Static and Dynamic Software Watermarking Methods

With the recent advancement in computing environments, software plays increasingly important role in real world applications. The time and effort for developing software are also increasing. Software license agreements are required from users to protect such software as intellectual properties of developers. However, the cases of software theft or license infringement are increasing every year. To cope with this problem, there have been several researches for protecting software licenses. In this paper, we introduce several approaches for software watermarking methods, which are technical approaches for identifying software copyright information. We compare their characteristics and performances in several evaluation metrics. Software watermarking methods are expected to be practical approaches for protecting and detecting the cases of software theft in several applications.