[3-18]Surreptitious Software - Techniques for protecting against software piracy, tampering and ...

Date:2009-03-17

Title：Surreptitious Software - Techniques for protecting against software piracy, tampering and illegal reverse engineering.

Speaker：Prof. Christian Collberg (University of Arizona)

Time：10：00－11：30 am, March 18 

Venue：Room 813

Abstract：
Surreptitious Software is the term I have chosen to describe a new branch of computer security that has emerged over the last decade. It’s a field that borrows techniques not only from computer security, but also from many other areas of Computer Science such as cryptography, steganography, media watermarking, software metrics, reverse engineering, and compiler optimization. Surreptitious software applies these techniques to solve very different problems: it is concerned with protecting the secrets contained within computer programs. I use the word "secrets" loosely, but the techniques I present in this talk (code obfuscation, software watermarking and fingerprinting, tamperproofing, and birthmarking) are typically used to prevent others from exploiting the intellectual effort invested in producing a piece of software. For example, software fingerprinting can be used to trace software pirates, code obfuscation can be used to make it more difficult to reverse engineer a program, and tamperproofing can make it harder for a hacker to remove a license check.

About the speaker:

Christian Collberg received a BSc in Computer Science and Numerical Analysis and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lund University, Sweden. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona and has also worked at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Prof. Collberg is a leading researcher in the intellectual property protection of software, and also maintains an interest in compiler and programming language research. In his spare time he writes songs, sings, and plays guitar for The Zax and hopes one day to finish up his Great Swedish Novel.