A method for detecting the theft of Java programs through analysis of the control flow information

A software birthmark refers to the inherent characteristics of a program that can be used to identify the program. In this paper, a method for detecting the theft of Java programs through a static software birthmark is proposed that is based on the control flow information. The control flow information shows the structural characteristics and the possible behaviors during the execution of program. Flow paths (FP) and behaviors in Java programs are formally described here, and a set of behaviors of FPs is used as a software birthmark. The similarity is calculated by matching the pairs of similar behaviors from two birthmarks. Experiments centered on the proposed birthmark with respect to precision and recall. The performance was evaluated by analyzing the F-measure curves. The experimental results show that the proposed birthmark is a more effective measure compared to earlier approaches for detecting copied programs, even in cases where such programs are aggressively modified. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.