A Beforehand Extraction Method for Dynamic Software Birthmarks using Unit Test Codes

The software birthmark methods are proposed to find the stolen software from the huge number of suspects. The software birthmark methods are classified into two manners, static and dynamic manners. Different from the static birthmarks, dynamic birthmarks require inputs since they base on runtime behaviors. Also, the dynamic birthmark varies depending on the inputs, therefore, it is difficult to extract beforehand. Hence the extraction cost of the dynamic birthmarks is generally high than the static birthmarks. This paper focuses on unit test codes in a project in order to extract the dynamic birthmarks beforehand, and reduce the extraction cost. The experiments evaluated the credibility and resilience performance of the birthmarks. The performance evaluation showed good results, the similarities were greater than 0.8 between most recent two versions of the same products, and were under 0.355 among different projects. In the cost evaluation, the proposed method can reduce the extraction cost of dynamic birthmarks.