Identifying Software Features as Birthmark

Abstract

Software can be dissected into features under various categories, such as syntactic features and semantic features that contain all the information related to the construction and functionality of the software. These features have intrinsic connections in-between which uniquely identify their working in a particular piece of software. These characteristics of software are known as a birthmark. A lot of research has been conducted to identify different techniques defining software birthmarks. A software birthmark uniquely identifies software and hence used to detect software theft and piracy. This research aims at identifying as much software features as possible and proposes a software feature model based on features lying under different categories. Each software will poses a unique value set for features identified according to that feature model. These value sets can then be used to detect similarity among software programs to detect software theft and piracy.