Application of Visual Cryptography Scheme in Software Watermarking

Software watermark is a unique identifier that is embedded in software that can be extracted later to prove the identity of the owner. Software is prone to threats like piracy, modification, and illicit use. In this technologically sophisticated period, software watermarking is necessary to authenticate ownership of the software. In the proposed scheme, collatz conjecture to embed the watermark is used and the input to collatz function is generated using a visual cryptographic scheme. The watermark value is split into different shares by the visual cryptographic secret sharing scheme. Instrumentation is done using sbt-instrumentation to extract the watermark. The advantage of this scheme is that it is flexible for any number of embedding points. This watermarking scheme is also resistant to model checking and watermarking attacks.