Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications

Source code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not r...

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Main Authors: P. Muthu Subramanian, A. Rajeswari
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2019-11-01
Series:Automatika
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00051144.2019.1578916
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author P. Muthu Subramanian
A. Rajeswari
author_facet P. Muthu Subramanian
A. Rajeswari
author_sort P. Muthu Subramanian
collection DOAJ
description Source code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not realistic in the present scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is one of the possible solutions for this problem. A novel watermarking technique is employed so that it can be easily and reliably detected by special techniques. In this paper, verification methods are presented to detect software plagiarism in the embedded application software without the implemented source code. All the approaches use side-channel information obtained during the execution of the suspicious code. The primary method is passive, i.e. no previous modification of the original code is required. It determines that the Hamming weights of the executed instructions of the suspicious device are used and uses string matching algorithms for comparisons with a reference implementation. The other method inserts additional code fragments as a watermark that can be identified in the power consumption of the executed source code. Proposed approaches are robust against code-transformation attacks.
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spelling doaj.art-c4697080d36d438e9ced5f0d4faa40202022-12-22T01:55:14ZengTaylor & Francis GroupAutomatika0005-11441848-33802019-11-0160552653410.1080/00051144.2019.15789161578916Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applicationsP. Muthu Subramanian0A. Rajeswari1Coimbatore Institute of TechnologyCoimbatore Institute of TechnologySource code plagiarism has become a serious threat for the development of small scale embedded industries and also the violations of intellectual property right are a threat for the development of hardware system. There are many software solutions for comparing source codes, but they are often not realistic in the present scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is one of the possible solutions for this problem. A novel watermarking technique is employed so that it can be easily and reliably detected by special techniques. In this paper, verification methods are presented to detect software plagiarism in the embedded application software without the implemented source code. All the approaches use side-channel information obtained during the execution of the suspicious code. The primary method is passive, i.e. no previous modification of the original code is required. It determines that the Hamming weights of the executed instructions of the suspicious device are used and uses string matching algorithms for comparisons with a reference implementation. The other method inserts additional code fragments as a watermark that can be identified in the power consumption of the executed source code. Proposed approaches are robust against code-transformation attacks.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00051144.2019.1578916microcontrollerssecurityembedded systems
spellingShingle P. Muthu Subramanian
A. Rajeswari
Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
Automatika
microcontrollers
security
embedded systems
title Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
title_full Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
title_fullStr Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
title_full_unstemmed Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
title_short Implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller-based applications
title_sort implementation of security module to protect programme theft in microcontroller based applications
topic microcontrollers
security
embedded systems
url http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00051144.2019.1578916
work_keys_str_mv AT pmuthusubramanian implementationofsecuritymoduletoprotectprogrammetheftinmicrocontrollerbasedapplications
AT arajeswari implementationofsecuritymoduletoprotectprogrammetheftinmicrocontrollerbasedapplications