In this paper we propose a new scheme for software obfuscation and license protection that is based on an original transformation of the program’s call tree. The idea is based on the observation of similarities between a program’s call tree and Context Free Grammars. First, this paper proposes a practical technique for applying well studied LALR methodologies to transforming a program’s call tr...

Policymakers in both the developed and less developed worlds have increasingly considered intellectual property protection as a major means to attract foreign direct investment (Yu, 2007, pp. 892–901). However, stronger intellectual property protection is not always needed to attract such investment. In the case of China, foreign investors were not attracted by the strong intellectual property ...

Blind image forensics aims to assess image authenticity. One of the most popular families of methods from this category is the detection of copy-move forgeries. In the past years, more than 15 different algorithms have been proposed for copy-move forgery detection. So far, the efficacy of these approaches has barely been examined. In this paper, we: a) present a common pipeline for copy-move fo...

Assessing a system’s vulnerability is a widely used method to estimate the effects of risks. In the past years, increasingly dynamic vulnerability assessments were developed to display changes in vulnerability over time (e.g. in climate change, coastal vulnerability, and flood management). This implies that the dynamic influences of management strategies on vulnerability need to be considered i...

We describe how an open computing device can be extended to allow individual programs and operating systems to have exclusive access to cryptographic keys. This problem is of fundamental importance in areas such as virus protection, protection of servers from network attacks, network administration and copy protection. We seek a system that can be unconditionally robust against software attacks...

This paper presents a time-sequential simulation technique incorporating the effects of interruptions and voltage sags in the reliability cost/worth evaluation of distribution systems equipped with different overvoltage protection types. The interruption and voltage sag data for different overvoltage protection schemes was obtained from long-term measurements performed at a 110/20 kV substation...

The economic analysis of the piracy of copyright products has used a variety of modeling assumptions, the majority of which are set in typical industrial organization settings. The results of such models are manyfold, but in general they are ambiguous as to the optimal protection strategy, and the effects of protection on the welfare of copyright holders, and on the existence of piracy. Concret...

Governments in many countries have actively promoted both regulatory and self-regulatory approaches to govern e-commerce and to protect e-consumers. Nevertheless, the desired outcomes of e-consumer protection have not fully materialised. Although there are many research projects about ecommerce, security, privacy, trust, etc., few relate to e-consumer protection. In addition, most projects on e...

We propose a new algorithm for the reliable detection and localization of video copy-move forgeries. Discovering well crafted video copy-moves may be very difficult, especially when some uniform background is copied to occlude foreground objects. To reliably detect both additive and occlusive copymoves we use a dense-field approach, with invariant features that guarantee robustness to several p...

Traditionally, the government has been the sole entity to enforce anti-piracy measures. Of late, software vendors are attempting to thwart piracy of their products by limiting the patch to only legal users. By doing so, the vendor can vertically differentiate the legal copy from the pirated copy since pirates suffer more from hacker activity. Such an action by the vendor has interesting implica...