A Novel Fragile Zero Software Watermarking Algorithm for Tamper Detection

Nowadays software is widely used in all domains and there is also a surge in cyber-attacks. Embedding signature in the source code is considered one of the better way to defend software piracy which is known as watermarking. Some of the current watermarking approaches like hashing and embedding the signature, increases execution time and size of code respectively. In order to address this issue, proposed a zero-code based fragile watermarking algorithm where the execution time is same as that of original software and there is no change in size of the code. The embedding algorithm segments the source code and produces a key based on the input watermark and a keyword of user's choice. The extraction algorithm uses this key to check if the extracted watermark from source code is same. From the experimental results it is evident that, the proposed approach is fragile and tamper resistant.